And I did. She lay, tiny, wasted bird, under some kind of police shroud, while around her detectives and constables looked for “clues,” or imagined themselves to be doing so by light of not-very-efficient gas lanterns.
“They’ve got boys out asking for parishioners to come by and identify the unfortunate deceased, but so far, no takers.”
“Cut up badly, is she?”
“First constable says so.”
“Why so little blood?” It was true. I had expected red sloppage everywhere, scarlet in the lamplight. Melodramatic imagination!
“I’m guessing soaked into her clothes. All that crinoline sops up anything liquid, blood, jizz, beer, wine, vomit—”
“Enough,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Now you know what we know.”
“Excellent. Will the coppers let us see the body?”
“We’ll see.”
I stood there another few minutes, until a two-wheeled mortuary cart was brought close to her, and two constables bent to lift her. They would transport her—now technically an it—to the Old Montague Street Mortuary, which was not far away.
“I say,” I said to the nearest uniform, “I’m from the Star. I’m not part of this jackal mob but an authentic journalist. It would help if I could see a bit, old man.”
He turned and looked at me as if I were the lad in the Dickens story who had the gall to ask for more.
“The Star,” I repeated as if I hadn’t noted his scowl and astonishment. “Maybe mention you, get you a promotion.”
I was naturally corrupt. I understood immediately without instruction that a little limelight does any man’s career a bit of good, and having access to it, which the penny-a-liners never did, was a distinct advantage.
“Come on, then,” he said, and although it wasn’t expressed, I could sense the outrage and indignation of the peasants behind me and rather enjoyed it. He pulled me to the mortuary cart, and as the fellows struggled to shove the poor lady into her carriage, he halted them, so that she was held at equipoise between worlds, as it were, and pulled back the tarpaulin.
I expected more from my first corpse. And if the boys thought I’d puke my guts up, I disappointed them. It turned out that, like so much else in this world, death was overrated.
She lay, little bunny, in repose. Broad of face, blank of stare, doughy of construction, stiller than any stillness I’d ever seen. There seemed to be the purpling of a bruise on the right side of that serene face, but someone had otherwise composed her features so that I was spared tongue, teeth, saliva, whatever is salubrious about the bottom part of face. Her jaw did not hang agape but was pressed firmly shut, her mouth a straight jot. I wish I could say her eyes haunted me, but in fact they bore the world no malice and radiated no fear. She was beyond fear or malice. Her eyes were calm, not intense, and bereft of human feeling. They were just the eyes of a dead person.
I looked at the neck, where the dress had been pulled down so the coppers could have their look-see at the death wounds. I look-saw two deep if now bloodless slices, almost atop each other, crisscrossing from under left ear to center of throat.
“He knew what he was doing, that one,” said the sergeant who was sponsoring my expedition. “Deep into the throat, no mucking about, got all the rivers of blood on the first one, the second was purely ornamental.”
“Surgeon?” I asked. “Or a butcher, a rabbi, a pig farmer?”
“Let the doc tell you when he makes up his mind. But the fellow knew his knife.”
With that, one of the coppers threw the tarpaulin over her again, and her face vanished from the world.
“There’s more, I’m told,” I said. “I have to see it. Spare me her notch if you can, let the poor dear have a little dignity, but I have to see what else the man did.”
The three officers held a conversation with their eyes among themselves, and then one flipped up the material at midsection and carefully burrowed into her nest of clothing, exposing just the wound and nothing of delicacy.
“That, too, took some strength, I’d judge,” said the sergeant.
Indeed. It was an ugly excavation running imprecisely down her left side, say ten inches to the left of the navel (which I never saw), curving at her hip bone, cutting inward toward the centerline of her body. It, too, was bled out; it, too, left flaky blood debris in its wake; but it was somehow rawer than the throat cuts, and I could see where the blood had congealed into a kind of black (in that light) gruel or even pudding.
“Show him the punctures,” said the sergeant.
Another adjustment was made, and I saw where the knife’s point had been lightly “danced,” almost gaily, across her abdomen. A smudge of pubis hair was exposed in this exploration, but none of us mentioned it, as such things, even among men, were unmentionable twenty-four years ago.
THE BODY OF A WOMAN WAS DISCOVERED LAST NIGHT—
“No, no,” said Henry Bright. “We’re selling news, not informing the ladies of the tea party. Get the blood up front.”
Henry was hovering over my shoulder as I assailed the Sholes & Glidden, moving my Pitman notes into English prose. I had just returned from Buck’s Row, paying the hansom driver extra to force his way through the dawn and its increase in traffic, and seated myself directly at the machine. Henry was on me like a crazy man. Maybe he was the murderer!
A WOMAN WAS BUTCHERED LAST NIGHT IN WHITECHAPEL BY PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN.
“Yes,” said Henry. “Yes, yes, that’s it.”
THE BODY WAS DISCOVERED—
“No, no, save that for the jump. Get to the wounds, the blood. Get a copper assessment up there, too, to give it some spice.”
HER THROAT WAS SLASHED—
“Brutally,” offered Henry.
—BY TWO PENETRATING BLADE STROKES WHICH CAUSED VIOLENT EXSANGUIN—
“No, no. Are we at Oxford? Are we chatting with Professor Prissbottom about the latest in pre-Renaissance decadence?”
—BLOOD LOSS. SHE EXPIRED IN SECONDS.
THEN THE MAN—
THEN THE BEAST—
“Yes, that’s it,” said Henry.
—THE BEAST RAISED HER SKIRTS AND USED HIS KNIFE TO MUTILATE HER ABDOMEN, OPENING ANOTHER LONG, DEEP, AND THIS TIME JAGGED CUT.
“New graf,” said Henry.
FINALLY, HE FINISHED HIS GRISLY NIGHT’S WORK WITH A SERIES OF RANDOM STAB WOUNDS ACROSS HER BELLY—
“Can I say ‘belly?’ ” I asked. “It’s rather graphic.”
“Leave it for now. I’ll check with T.P. It’s right on the line. The gals don’t have bellies or tits or arses in the Star. Maybe the Express, not the Star. But times are changing.”
—AND HIPS.
POLICE SAY THE BODY WAS DISCOVERED AT 3:40 A.M. BY CHARLES CROSS ON HIS WAY TO WORK AS HE WALKED DOWN BUCK’S ROW, WHERE HIS HOME—
“’is ’ome,” joshed Henry, playing on the cockney aversion to H’s, and evincing the universal newspaper stricture that all reporters and editors are superior to the poor sots they quote or write for.
—IS LOCATED.
“IT TOOK SOME STRENGTH AND SKILL TO DO THIS TERRIBLE THING,” SAID METROPOLITAN POLICE SERGEANT JAMES ROSS.
POLICE REMOVED THE BODY TO THE OLD MONTAGUE STREET MORTUARY, WHERE A SURGEON WILL FURTHER EXAMINE IT FOR CLUES. MEANWHILE, A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WOMAN’S FACE WILL BE TAKEN FOR CIRCULATION IN HOPES OF IDENTIFICATION.
There was a last bit of business. Since my pseudonym, Horn, was affiliated with music, it occurred to Henry Bright that I should write crime under my own name. Gad, I didn’t want that, as I had aspirations of mingling with the quality and wanted no whiff of blood floating about my presence. So he said, “All right, then, lad, come up with something else. Dickens called himself Boz; certainly you can do better than that.”
“I can,” I said, and reached into my past to something only my sister, Lucy, had called me, as her child’s tongue could not manage my initials and they had eroded into a single syllable. “Call me Jeb.”