What decent woman would be out and about in the dead of night?

I saw it then. I saw her true nature, and how narrowly I had escaped disaster.

She is a whore. She walks the streets at night, taking coins from eager customers. She sells herself for the price of a pint, shameless as an alley cat.

I see now that in my heart I always knew. It was why I threw her over. At the time I had no clear conception of my motives. Now all is clear.

She was whoring even then, behind my back. She and Amelia also. Their virginal modesty is a sham. They are as chaste as goats. Pure as ditch water. Clean as soot.

In his paranoia and delusion he had misinterpreted the roommate's understandable reluctance to let him enter. Most likely Kitty had been there all along, and Amelia was simply covering for her. But he couldn't see the obvious truth.

His next entry explored his epiphany. The neat penmanship of earlier passages was gone. Now she saw many of the distinguishing traits of criminal handwriting. Dot grinding, the deep indentation of periods and similar shapes produced by jabbing pen into paper. Variable pressure, as the writer at times allowed his pen to flow lightly, then abruptly bore down. Extreme angularity, the script slanting hard to the right. Harpoons—fishhook-shaped strokes originating well below the baseline.

The stroke analysis suggested an explosive personality, boiling with rage.

I find my mind so crowded with thoughts—strange new linkages of ideas all unifying into a comprehensive overview. I see—everything. The world is a sump of vice and filth, women lowering themselves like beasts, men sharing their degradation--illness and debauchery! Pestilence and pollution! We are fleshly things. What is the female? What gives her this power? The blood in her which is her life. They are called the weaker sex, the gentle sex—a lie! If they are so weak why do they rule us with their cunts?

We’re told it is conscience that distinguishes Mankind from lower animals. A sanctimonious lie. Conscience is but a weakness imbued in us by those who would control us. Remember poor Augustine: ’Give me chastity and continence but not yet!’ Conscience places the natural man at war with himself, his hardy spirit made impotent by social doctrine, strait-jacketed. Meantime what of the men who break free? They are made to wear actual strait jackets, confined to hospitals, shut up in cages.

Can not keep it to myself. It is my calling, my mission.

The others won’t know—no one will know. It will be my secret. My private undertaking ha ha there’s a good word. I am the undertaker indeed. I will give the penny-a-liners something to write about and the public some better entertainment than Mr Mansfield’s play.

Absurd that a worthless piece of baggage like Kitty should have got me thinking clearly for the first time in my life. Or had I worked it out already without knowing? Like Moliere’s middle-class gentleman who spoke prose without realising, have I been dreaming murders my whole life long all unaware? Those continental alienists are right, the mind is a fascinating instrument, we shall never plumb its depths.

I am laughing. It is all so comical, a fever dream, brain fever as the doctors call it—but I need no doctor. It is humanity that ails and I am to provide the succour.

Whirling thoughts, weird associative leaps, unfocused hostility.

Schizophrenia. That was where the clues pointed. He might have been experiencing his first psychotic break. If so, he’d been no older than his mid-twenties. An Englishman—that much was obvious from Britishisms like penny-a-liner, as well as spellings like succour.

Her great-grandfather, Graham Silence, had immigrated from England to America sometime in the late nineteenth century. And schizophrenia ran in the family.

To-night I do it. There will be no backing down. If I am a man I write my next entry in blood.

She felt a slow chill move through her, as though these words had been whispered in her ear, not set down in writing by a man long dead. She found herself touching the long rope of scar tissue beneath her shirt sleeve.

The next undated entry recorded a kill.

Deed is done. Dead is done. Dead is deed, deed is death—indeed.

My thirsty knife swallowed up her life.

I’m a rhymer and a two-timer.

I make verse—and worse.

And laughter...after!

I must maintain my self-possession. But it is all so hilarious and wonderful. I had not expected—I hadn’t guessed—there was not much blood, the creature was nearly dead before I cut her throat—tilted her head away from me so I wouldn’t be splashed—got none on me, not a drop. Not then. But unsexing her—messy work. Much blood. I drained her dry, every drop. Blood is life. All her power, all her life washing my hands as in my dreams. I left her hollow as a gourd.

So damnably easy. I had thought it would be hard but she put up no struggle, merely twitched and shook as I squeezed her neck from behind. A thousand times I’ve imagined what could go wrong, every miscue and disaster but my imaginings were airy foolishness. I could kill a dozen a night and no one would ever spot me. Maybe I will kill a dozen next time. I am so eager to start again, my knife’s so sharp, it cuts so well and makes no sound. Opening her up—like slicing gabardine. I can still feel the warmth of her insides as the folds of flesh parted. Could’ve toasted cheese in that heat. A bit of her—how would she taste? She smelled good inside like stew.

She drew a breath. She realized she was shaking.

Was it poor Kitty he'd murdered, or Amelia? She almost didn’t want to know.

The entry that followed was brief and factual, and it surprised her.

Written up in the papers today. Mary Ann Nichols was her name. Called Polly by friends.

So he hadn't targeted his fiancée or her roommate. He had gone after a stranger.

In the following pages he entertained himself by mocking the police—“such tremendous fools, such splendid jackanapes.”

Halfway through the diary, she turned a page and saw a string of unpunctuated, uncapitalized words, scrawled in a feverish hand.

claimed another whore

Below it lay an irregular rust-colored blot and a second spidery line of script.

fresh out of whitechapel a few drops from my knife

It came together for her like a door slamming. England, Whitechapel, blood, knife, whores.

Jennifer looked up slowly.

It was just possible that the diary in her hands was written by Jack the Ripper.

1891

The poet Robert Burns was right. The best laid plans o’ mice and men, and all that.

Hare had expected to read of the foreigner’s arrest in the first news accounts of the murder at the East River Hotel. Instead he encountered quite a different story.

The dead woman had been found in the morning by the hotel staff. She was known as a regular patron of the establishment, a certain Carrie Brown.

But the man who had lodged with her was not in police custody. He had disappeared. Only his name was known, or at least the name signed in the hotel registry: C. Kniclo.