He felt little pain, perhaps a sting, and jerked, as if to say “Ouch!” or “Damn!” but his pressure dropped instantly and he sat backward with a smack as his buttocks hit cobblestone, the cosh dropped from hand, and he shook his head. He could not believe, as I have noted before, that this moment, which all must face, was upon him. An instant senility came across him, and his face seemed to melt toward languor, losing all firmness and jut.
“By Christ,” he said, “you’ve killed me.”
“By Christ, I have,” I said.
“Aw, Jesus.”
“He can’t help you, friend,” I said as I cleaned my blade on his rough workman’s sleeve. “He’s working elsewhere. You heart will pump dry in less than a minute as you become drowsier and drowsier. Any last words for the monseigneur?”
My little jest flew over his head. Nothing like being murdered to kill a sense of humor!
“Sir,” he said, “me boy Jamie is parked at St. Barnaby’s Rectory orphanage in Shadwell. I’ve got a few pounds in me stash, can you see he gets it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “If I give the money to Jamie, his mates will be jealous and beat him and steal it, and he will curse you into eternity. Instead, I’ll give it to the rector for all the boys in your name, and all will benefit. I’ll even match it, and you should consider yourself well treated by Jack the Ripper. On top of that, you got to meet a famous man before you died, and how many of your station can say the same? You have no cause for complaint.”
“Aw, Christ,” he said, eyes opening wide in amazement. “Jack himself! Just my bleedin’ luck!”
It was his last sentence.
I looked about and all was silent. Pennington Street, a hundred feet away, showed no sign of commotion. The woman was long gone, no doubt back at the Rookery, waiting for her man to come home so they could go out for a nice glass of gin and then have a bounce among the bedbugs.
I thought the better of leaving him there, so I dragged him to the quayside. He was heavy, but my sense of the pleasure of the kill filled my muscles with magic elixir, so it was not as difficult as it might have been. Before I let him slip, I removed the cache and found four pound eight, which I wadded and stuffed in my pocket. I rolled him, controlling him as he went, almost wrenching my back. But there was no splash as he slipped away, disappearing in seconds in the quarter-moon’s light, beneath the arrival of a swell. On either side, two vast merchantmen towered, creaking, rocking, but from them came nothing but silence. I picked up the cosh, a leather pouch filled with lead shot grafted to a short wood grip, and tucked it away for who knew what possibility.
I expect to hear nothing about the fellow. It was as if he never lived, and the lump on my head will go down in two days or so. It will ache a bit longer, but that is the price of the business I am in.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Jeb’s Memoir
It all turned on three letters, and the colonel knew where to look for them, and quick as a fox, he provided Penny with the names so designated and specifics of three officers so marked, and just as quick, Penny forwarded them to me.
The three letters of the crucial designation were: “s/ID.” That meant “Seconded to the Intelligence Department,” which was both the kiss of professional death in the army—once tainted with exposure to the black world of intelligence procedures, the officer had sealed his administrative fate and would never rise to the level of a general officer, as the boys in charge did not trust their own spies—and the ticket to some truly interesting adventures. It was amazing how many brave officers would give up forever their chance at wearing the general’s insignia for a few years of scuttling around the hills beyond Kabul with the Pathan. To a certain mind, I could tell, it was someone’s idea of jolly fun! Pip, pip, ho, ho, all larky and merry in the Great Game, shan’t we have a dashing good time, Geoffrey, and to Hades with those hidebound mummies at headquarters! Perhaps sexual possibility was part of the lure, for the dusky-skinned, sloe-eyed beauties of the brown races were said to have lesser standards of acquiescence than our Victorian ladies behind their crinolines and tight bodices. Because we had so many men with these issues in their brains, we had an empire.
Two majors and a lieutenant colonel. The names meant nothing to me, nor the regiments from which they had sprung, though one fellow, a major, was a double outlier, as he was seconded initially from his “real” regiment to something all woggy called the 3rd Queen’s Own Bombay Cavalry. It was in the Bombay Cavalry that he had survived the ruinous defeat at Maiwand, in 1880, as had the other two in their respective regiments or whatever they were (I’ll never get the military system of regiment and battalion and brigade straight!). All were shortly thereafter “s/ID”ed, if such a term existed, at which point the archivists of the British army lost track of them, and at intervals of, respectively, eighteen months, two years, and, my God!, five years, they were “r/RHq,” meaning “Returned to Regimental Headquarters,” which is a way of saying home safe. Who knows how many of the s/ID boys never made it back to r/RHq and had their guts pulled out on some dry knob in the Hindu Kush? Such is the price of empire.
Major R. F. Pullham (Ret.), 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, (KCB) (DCM)
Major P. M. MacNeese (Ret.), E Battery/B Brigade, Royal Horse Artillery (DSO) (DCM) (CGM)
Lieutenant Colonel H. P. Woodruff (Ret.), 66th Berkshire Regiment of Foot (KCB) (VC)
The fuel of empire is bravery. Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, whatever the mechanics of the thing, these fellows had it, as the bland display of initials compressed between parens behind their “(Ret.)” designation made clear. Knowing full well I was a congenital coward, I could never understand what makes a man brave. Is it strength, stubbornness, intelligence, instinct, possibly even fear of something worse than what awaits him in the ordeal immediately ahead, whether it’s a valley with guns to left and right, or the cunning pleasure of a tribal torturer? As I say, one can doubt the wisdom of it, the ethics of it, the sheer criminality of it on the global scale, but one cannot doubt the courage.
At the same time, I took to this development rather wholeheartedly. It provided something to Jack that heretofore was absent, and that absence—a clear frame of reference and possibility—had occluded, I believed, our attempts to understand and thereby locate him.
Clearly, the only men with answers were the listed three, all Afghan vets of great valor, all recently retired, all s/ID at length, all well under six feet. Like a Tantric prayer, I committed the rhythms to memory: MacNeese, Pullham, and Woodruff. One, it seemed, would have a spelling impairment and two purloined wedding bands and that, as they say, would be that!
Penny’s knowledgeable colonel had even provided addresses, so that cut one difficulty out of the process. Dare and I charted them on a map of London and learned that Major MacNeese lived on one of the better streets in Whitechapel, while both Major Pullham and the Welsh colonel (H stood for Huw, Welsh spelling) Woodruff were farther out, though all were within an hour’s walk of the murder sites, and all were close to public transportation—the Underground or horse-tram lines—that could get them there and back without a bit of trouble.
We agreed to start with MacNeese, on the grounds that the closer he was, the more likely his candidacy seemed. We were aware, too, that time was passing. We had gotten by the quarter-moon phase of late October without a death, for no reason anyone understood. If Professor Dare’s theory of quarter-moon-as-optimum-mission time held true, that meant that November 6 or 7 would bring Jack and his knife to the street again. We felt it best to make quick surveys of each man and determine if any was more promising than the others. If one stood out with a special vividness of possibility, he would be the one we focused on exclusively, and when we developed evidence, we would take it to Inspector Abberline. It seemed sound then. It still does, even when I know how it all turned out.