“Well, favor me by not using the juicy quote I just uttered. It sounds casual, but Peelers see enough of this raw hacking so they usually joke about it on-site. It doesn’t play well with the public.”
“ ‘Commissioner Smith solemnly told the Star that this new murder demanded the utmost in professionalism from all authorities, and pledged to provide it,’ that sort of thing, sir?”
“This man will go a long way. All right, Jeb, stay close, don’t make us look bad, and make no mistakes.”
“He never makes mistakes, sir,” said Collard.
“Yes, the fellow who uncovered the Mystery of Annie’s Rings. How poignant that was. How many extra papers, I wonder, did it sell?”
“My job, sir. That’s all.”
“May I interrupt to point something out that might be a clue?” said the surgeon.
“Good God, a clue! How novel! If you please,” said Smith.
“I note raw hem in the bunched cotton at her neck. May I unbunch it?”
“Why would you not?”
The doctor’s fingers probed the rolled lineaments and glibly separated one sheaf. He unspooled it, being sure to keep it off the body itself, so as not to contaminate it with blood or other fluids. It turned out to be apron or, rather, half an apron. A rather large segment had gone missing.
“A trophy, I wonder?” said Collard.
“Possibly. More like a missing piece of a puzzle,” said Smith. “We could not miss such a thing, nor the shape of what’s missing. Planted somewhere else, it would link sites for some mad reason that only this fellow understands. He likes that we wait, we wonder, and he explains when and if it pleases him. But it is something new; it is a communication. He has a message to put out. That’s why you’re here, Jeb. You explain it to us.”
“Perhaps it’s for himself,” I said. “He has taken organs before but has learned they are perishable. Or he’s eaten them already, with a fine claret and field beans from the South of France. He wishes to have something to cling to, to clutch tight to bosom, to look upon and remember his moment of glory. Something more meaningful than Annie’s famous rings, perhaps, which would carry no texture, no odor, no absorbency.”
“Mad as a monkey,” said Smith. “But in a highly organized way. This is no hot-blooded maniac. It’s something I’ve never encountered. A cold-blooded maniac. I believe he’s got a plan behind all of this.”
It proceeded then at a slow pace. I felt no pressure myself, for it was Sunday early, and the Star didn’t publish on Sunday, which meant my deadline wasn’t until seven A.M. tomorrow, Monday, over twenty-four hours away—so I knew that we had to be thorough, steady, fair, and well organized. The rush to deadline would not be an excuse, although I had yet to make a mistake.
I meandered about Mitre Square. The coppers had let more and more people in, including some of those aforementioned daily reporters. I shared what I had with them—you don’t want your peers hating your guts if it’s not necessary, now, do you?—and they appreciated Jeb’s cooperative nature. I saw that Constable Watkins was freed up and chatted with him, getting good quotations. Sometimes the directness of the nonliterary can be a refreshment. He said she’d been “ripped up like a pig in a market.” Good line, that.
Just when I thought I was done and could get back home, grab some sleep, curse out my mother again, then return to the office refreshed for a long session at the Sholes machine, what should enter the yard but a copper who raced to Smith in alarm.
I could see the jolt of electricity it supplied to the worn-down crew of police executives. Smith seemed especially to pop to life and began shouting orders. I moseyed to Inspector Collard, who seemed in a rush to leave. “I say, what’s it all about?”
“They’ve found the missing apron piece not four blocks off. And the bastard has left us a message.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Diary
September 30, 1888 (cont’d)
I strode through the night, imagining what I’d left behind. It may have been my happiest time in the whole adventure. Again, I had missed apprehension by the width of a hair, so I was feeling invulnerable. I felt my superior intelligence was validated on the grand scale, and in a game against not only my enemies but the entire city of London, from working girls to academic aristocrats. I was on the verge of not merely victory but triumph. I was routing them. They had no idea who and what I was, why I was doing what I was doing, what drove me. The last was important, because without knowledge of it, they assumed I was a chaotic madman and could be caught only by the net of chance, not logic. And all the lists of “suspects”—Jews, Poles, boyfriends, witnesses who lied—published by the newspapers proved that our best minds were hopelessly out of the game.
I eventually reached Goulston Street. It was deserted. By day a buzzing commercial street (the poultry market was thereupon), it was by night closed down, not a beer shop or Judy part of town, and the shuttered costers’ sheds along either side of the street were unpatrolled and locked. I could see piles of fruit behind iron gratings, hear the squawk and bustle of crated chickens that hadn’t been sold and had therefore earned another day of life in their tiny dung-crusted dungeons, smell the shit from the horses as it formed a steady presence on the dirt road. All the pennants—why are market streets usually festooned like medieval jousting tournaments?—hung limp in the moist though not rainy air. It had the feel of a city abandoned by its citizens, who’d fled to jungle or cave to escape a portended doom. Perhaps I was that doom, or at least its harbinger.
I eased down Goulston between the shuttered stalls and the blank wall of this or that apartment building, looking for a nook where I could do my business without observation. I was alongside something calling itself the Wentworth Model Dwellings, a grim brick fortress against the night for those fortunate enough to afford the tariff, when I espied an archway that contained a door to whatever squalor and degradation lay on the several floors above. It was perfect.
I nipped into it, and first thing, I pulled the damned lump of apron from my pocket and dumped it. It did not fall right—I wanted the blood to show conspicuously so not even the thickest of the thick could miss its implications. Some fluffing was required to achieve the proper show.
That done, I fetched a piece of chalk from my trousers, where it had been secured for just this purpose. I had thought carefully about the message for almost a month, parsed it as lovingly as any poet does his poem, for it had to carry certain messages and certain implications but nothing more. I found a suitable emptiness of wall and began to inscribe my message, large enough to be seen as language, not scrawl, taking my time. I had thought it out as a visual expression, lines perfectly symmetrical, a quatrain of long, short, long, short, a few brisk syllables, perfectly clear as to meaning and intent and—
Good Christ!
I nearly leaped out of my boots.
As I labored in intense concentration and was nearly through the third line, something—someone—had poked me in the small of the back.
I turned, aghast, my heart hammering like a steam engine gone berserk and near exploding, reached back for the Sheffield, and turned to confront the enemy I must slay.
It was a child.
She was about six, frail and pale with a raw burlap makeshift sack on, her grubby feet bare, her hair blond and stringy, flowing down her face over huge and radiant eyes, skin like pearl yet here and there smeared with dirt.