“He’s right. Readers need to attach a human identity to whoever’s doing the talking. It makes the thing have a complete sense to it,” said Mr. O’Connor.
“If you get the name, you’ll be way ahead. Also, cultivate that copper. The bastard detectives will play awesome, as if they’re university men among the pig farmers, but they probably don’t know half as much as the sharp-eyed street constable. Maybe your friend has resentments against them from slights delivered with which you can pry information out of him. Envy is the juice in which the world bubbles, with dashes of malice tossed in to bring the human stew to a delicious boil.”
I did all of that, napping at the paper. It worked out surprisingly well. Indeed, Sergeant Ross gave me the name out of thanks for the light the Star’s original story had shone on him, more than the poor man had ever got in his life, after years of dedicated work. Most important to him, it turned out, was how his mention had buzzed off the gentlemen from the Metropolitan Police Bethel Green J Division, CID, who had been handed the investigation.
Via the Records Department, I got to poor Polly’s husband first, and even broke the news to him. If I’d had a shred of human mercy left, I might have allowed the fellow a moment of repose after hearing that the woman he once loved, the woman who gave him five children, made his food, and gave him her body for twenty-six years before she lost her soul to demon gin, was now dead horribly in the gutter, all cut and minced. Quite the opposite: Knowing him to be vulnerable, I pressed him and got good details. My ambition was as fully sized as any addiction to opium by now. It had been a bit of time since he’d seen her, but through his eyes, I was at least able to give the poor old girl some humanity. That’s the rub of the newspaper game, I realized. It helps me, it does indeed, but it helps you, too, in the long run, though the gain may be a bit late to play out.
Then I went to the Frying Pan, a disagreeable enough place, and there found two souls—the barkeep and Emma Lownes, no fixed address other than the odd week or two in the Lambeth Workhouse, and for the thruppence it took to secure Emma a nice glass of gin that I doubt was distilled by Boodle’s, she evoked the decency of her late friend, her own fear of a man who stabbed and slashed by night, and her extremely limited prospects. In the end I gave her another thruppence, meant to go for a quiet night at a doss house, but I’m sure it went through her gullet and was pissed out by seven that evening.
Finally, having evoked the victim in vivid colors, I went on to the sorry state of the police investigation, Sergeant Ross being once again my confidential source. We met furtively, like spies, in a Whitechapel public house called the Alma, after the great victory in the Crimean War nearly half a century before. By day, it was a dark and low place, with no energy nor fire to it and only dissolute beer fiends and lonely Judys wasting their doss money on gin.
“You can’t use me name on this one,” he said. “Old Warren”—he meant Sir George Warren, embattled head of the Metropolitans—“has set a policy of reticence. You won’t be hearing much on this case, and anything gets out, they’ll be swift after the talker.”
“I will protect you. But in stories to come, you’ll emerge as the true hero of the case. To hell with the CID. They only exist to take bribes anyhow.”
“Appreciated, guv’nor. So this is where we seem to be at”—he paused for the effect—“and that’s nowhere.”
I nodded, having suspected as much. It would be a hard case to crack.
DESPITE INTENSE EFFORTS, POLICE PROGRESS IN THE CASE OF THE SLAUGHTERED WHITECHAPEL UNFORTUNATE, I would write that night, HAVE YET TO YIELD A SUBSTANTIAL CLUE.
AN EARLY ARREST IS RULED OUT, POLICE TELL THE STAR, AND THERE’S LITTLE THAT CAN BE DONE EXCEPT WAIT FOR THE DEMON TO STRIKE AGAIN AND HOPE HE LEAVES A CLEARER TRAIL.
Ross had confirmed what everyone with half a brain knew already, which was that the Metropolitan Police were dependent on the old methods. Though they knew of fingerprints in theory, they had no base or file of them to deploy and, unless left in blood on a knife blade or painted wall, were hard to record from other surfaces. They had only primitive chemistry and medical help, estimating time of death by lividity or temperature of body, a chancy method at best. Their techniques were as old as the Middle Ages: protection and examination of the crime scene, autopsy findings, questioning of suspects, local intelligence, interviews with witnesses, increase in patrolling in the crime area, and finally, reward. However, those techniques worked best when applied to a fellow who was part of an organized criminal underworld, worked for a gang like the High Rips, had mates and a boss and all the appurtenances of the aboveground world only perverted into criminality. He also would have competitors or enemies, neutral observers who would sell him out as a favor for someone else. There was a whole barter system—negotiation, feint, bluff, reward, and punishment—that really underlay the Metropolitan Police’s attempt to control the underworld, even as half successful as that was. Our boy, the mad butcher, was vulnerable to none of it, except by a chance that hadn’t happened or hadn’t evinced itself yet.
You could tick off the mistakes already made one by one: Not realizing how big the case would get, the coppers had been very sloppy on Buck’s Row, even allowing Jeb to track across the murder ground to look at the body as it was fitted into the cart; and the two constables had already mucked up the soil where they’d squirmed to find the leverage to lift poor Polly. The autopsy might yield something, but unless he left a calling card, it would reveal only that a knife was used, which was obvious even to Charlie Cross on his way to work.
As for suspects, presumably the coppers had an index with names of boys in the area who’d taken a hand or even a blade to whores in the past, but this crime was so out of scale with what had come before—and was being blown up even further by the industry of Jeb—that it was unlikely one of these lads had done the deed. All of us, copper, reporter, and reader alike, understood that some threshold had been achieved, some new level had been reached, and like it or not, we had entered a modern age. So the records would be of little use. Maybe the whores knew something, but by nature they weren’t the sort to chatter to CID swells, though the constabulary who shared the streets with them might fare a bit better.
Would extra patrols help? That alone bore some promise, if only to act as a deterrent to the killer’s mad impulses. Maybe, knowing that more constables were about, he’d decide his one triumph was enough to savor in old age. But that was unlikely. There was something unformed, even callow, about the taking of poor Polly’s life. It was like an expeditionary force, not an occupation; he wanted to see if he could get away with it, what it felt like, what could be learned from it, and might regard the increased patrolling as more of a challenge to his intellect.
After all, for all his boldness, he’d been very lucky, barely missing the blue bottles both coming and going. That would annoy him; he had expected so much more to be on his side than pure dumb luck. This time, having mastered the basics, he’d be sharper.
I left the Alma with my Pitman notepad chuck-full, looking for a hansom cab to get me to the office so I could amaze London tomorrow with yet more new revelations. But the traffic on Commercial Street was so heavy, a hansom would do me no good. So I decided to walk a few blocks up till it crossed Whitechapel, and if that broadway were clearer, I’d find the cab there. It was now about eight o’clock by my pocket watch, and up the street I hastened.
It struck me that in my several times here in Whitechapel, I’d never really looked at the place in full clarity. Now, at last, I had space and time and opportunity to behold the hell den where the killer lurked, the ladies walked, the gentlemen searched, and sex and death were in the air.