The Ability to Kill (19 page)

Most of the other theories are on a similar level. It was the sudden cessation of the murders that presented the theorists with their knottiest problem. Modern psychological medicine would probably find that the least perplexing aspect of the case. During the last fifty years a great deal had been discovered about schizophrenia, and the Ripper murders would probably be diagnosed now as a case of ‘fugue.’ It is even possible that after the murder of Marie Kelly, Jack the Ripper never again knew of that passage in his life. There was something climactic and final about those incredible elaborations. Perhaps, having achieved an apotheosis of horror, he had at last exorcised the evil that had haunted him.

But what did he look like?

We can be quite certain of two things; he looked ordinary, and he looked harmless. Admittedly most of his victims were more or less drunk, but there was a panic in the streets then, and poor Annie Chapman in her new bonnet would have to feel very safe before, doss or no doss, she went with a dubious stranger into the blackness of the yard behind 29 Hanbury Street. And when Catherine Eddowes met him, he had come straight from killing Elizabeth Stride by cutting her throat. There would, inevitably, be blood on his clothes. Moreover,
he had very nearly been caught by the sudden arrival of the man with the pony cart. Yet, to Catherine Eddowes, whom the police had thought sober enough to look after herself, he must have appeared normal and inoffensive. Probably, he was a local man, long known to all of these women and considered safe. One thing that seems unlikely is that the Ripper had the voice or manner of an educated Englishman, a ‘toff.’ Such a man would have been immediately suspect. Besides, surgeons are not the only ones who can dissect a body. Some butchers, too, have very skilful hands; and their eyes as they bend to their work are no less compassionate.

The face of murder, indeed, is more often bland than brutal, and a smile comes more readily to its lips than a snarl. Anyone who needs to be reminded just how unlike murderers real murderers look, should go to Madame Tussaud’s exhibition of waxworks just off Baker Street. There, down below in the Chamber of Horrors, are London murderers by the dozen—Heath, Christie, Haigh,
^a
Brides-in-the-Bath Smith, Chapman, who poisoned barmaids, Mrs Pearcey, who wheeled her victims’ bodies through the streets of London in a pram, Crippen, Sheppard, who hanged at Tyburn, Dougal of the Moat Farm House—as infamous an assembly as you could wish for, and one of which Londoners are naturally, if furtively, proud.

The price of admission is only four shillings. For the timid it is quite the safest way of seeing criminal London; but only the
safest
way. It is not the most reassuring. There is something very familiar about some of the faces. Can it be something in the faces of the other Londoners standing beside you? I shall be glad of your opinions.

‘Where can I see some real international spies?’

How often does one hear that simple question asked; and yet how rarely nowadays does one hear a well-informed reply. In a society devoted almost as enthusiastically to the diffusion of information about itself as it is to devising the means of its own destruction, this may seem incredible. But it is so. Useless to ask your travel agent. He just does not know; and if his nervous smile does not admit the fact at once, his mumbled references to Berlin and Vienna will very soon do so. The guide books, so helpful where food and architecture are concerned, do not even acknowledge the existence of spies.
^*
Even the great public libraries have no up-to-date intelligence on the subject.

Why?

It is tempting, of course, to attribute this state of affairs to the inhibiting influence of some Higher Authority; and I know several experienced spy-spotters who are convinced that they are up against a world-wide conspiracy of silence organised by the spies
themselves. Personally, I doubt this. True, international spies do not like being spotted; if they did there would be neither point nor pleasure in spotting them; but the theory of conspiracy implies a spirit of co-operation, a readiness to join loyally with one’s fellow men for a common good that is entirely foreign to all that is soundest in the international tradition.

No. The lamentable fact is, I think, that during the past decade the good, old-fashioned international spy, the vintage professional secret agent, has become so rare in the Anglo-Saxon countries that there has been a tendency to assume that the species is virtually extinct everywhere.

The assumption, mistaken though it is, is understandable. Try to think of one Anglo-Saxon spy trial during the last few years in which a real international pro. has been involved. You will find it difficult. Dissident scientists and technicians have no place in the spy-spotter’s notebook; and mere venality does not make a traitor into a professional spy as we like to understand the term.
^†
In the English-speaking areas this is the day of the amateur.

His unfortunate triumph has undoubtedly been due in the main to the need, where information about nuclear warfare is concerned, for special academic qualifications. If you want the secret of the new atomic warhead detonator, it is no use employing a man who may steal the plans of the kitchen equipment for the new canteen by mistake. There are, of course, a few professional spies with university educations, but not many of them have Ph.D.’s in physics, and it must be admitted frankly that a pass degree in the humanities or the ability to state Boyle’s Law is just not good enough, even for
work in the radar field. Sooner or later, American and British spotters will have to face the bitter fact that, in future, if they want to see active professional spies operating in their natural surroundings, they will have to go abroad to do it.

And they will have to go soon. It is said, I know, that there are still plenty of good hunting-grounds to be explored; and, admittedly, in the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East and South-East Asia, the situation for spies is not wholly impossible. In most of these areas the inhabitants can as yet do nothing about technical weapon development anyway, so that spies may still deal happily in the traditional items of military intelligence—numbers and movements of troops, locations of secret airstrips and ammunition dumps, thicknesses of armour plating, fire power, mobilisation plans, counter-espionage arrangements, states of readiness, plans of attack, anti-submarine boom defences, minefields and so on. And there are still, thank goodness, a few places where a good cover story and a well-forged passport are of more use to a man than a familiarity with the quantum theory. But for how long can this state of affairs last?

The truth is that life is not easy anywhere for the professional spy these days. At one time all you had to do if you wanted to spot spies was to take the Simplon-Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul. The second-class restaurant car was full of them, and identification was easy. You just took note of the travellers who had no trouble at all with passports or customs, and those were the spies.

Now it is very different. Not long ago, the
Observer
quoted an Orient Express Pullman attendant on the subject of immigration and currency restrictions.

‘Even during the war,’ this authority stated ruefully, ‘we had the usual number of spies going back and forth, but now even spies cannot get the necessary travel permits.’

Happily, some of the more stultifying restrictions have since been eased, but it is still difficult to move from country to country in Eastern Europe, while in some areas of Asia the difficulties of getting a visa are further complicated by a regulation that makes it necessary to get the visa itself visa’d. I shall return to this development when I discuss the special problems of spies in Indonesia. My point here is that freedom of movement is the life blood of espionage and that restrictions that are merely irksome for the spy-spotter, may be positively unhealthy for the spy himself. We should be grateful that, in the face of so much discouragement, so many spies are prepared to carry on.

One more thing before we set off for the hunting grounds. The honest spy-spotter merely looks. He does not touch. Photography is permissible if the spy is foolish or slow-footed enough to permit it. Challenging is not allowed; neither is shadowing. Both have been found dangerous.

The unforgivable sin is to become officious.

I heard of one case which makes the blood run cold. The man was in Cairo on government business. Finding himself with time on his hands he naturally began spotting, and, beginner though he was, he very soon ‘found.’ A few days later he was dining with an Egyptian government official and actually
told
him. As a result the find was arrested. He was certainly a spy, and also badly wanted by the police for gold smuggling. And the worst of this abominable little story is that, while one cannot but feel saddened and disgusted by the wanton destruction of a good spy, one cannot help envying the vandal who was able to check his score so very conclusively. Of course, positive identification of that order comes only once or twice in a lifetime. I have had only one so far and though it happened as long ago as 1937, I still think of it with gratitude
and affection; though not, as you will see, without some bitterness, too.

I was convalescing after an illness and the doctor advised a few weeks rest in the sun; so I decided to take a boat and go to Tangier.

From a medical point of view, Tangier was an idiotic choice. The Spanish Civil War was in progress at the time, and, of course, the international zone of Tangier had a frontier with Spanish Morocco. In 1937, all sorts of rearguard actions were still being fought in the city; and not only in terms of undercover work, of kidnappings and discreet assassinations. The peace of the warm, soft nights was constantly shattered by the sounds of rival political bands fighting gun battles in the streets. The walls and mirrors in those dingy little cafés down the Petit Suk were pock-marked and starred with bullet holes, while on the chairs outside, gloomy looking Arabs sipped mint tea and fingered the revolvers beneath their djibbahs. The week before I arrived, a party of armed sailors from a foreign destroyer in the harbour had actually marched ashore and attempted to seize the Spanish (Loyalist) post office. After a three-hour siege, they had been driven off by machine-gun fire from the post office and retired with their wounded to the destroyer; but it was rumoured that a German pocket battleship would arrive the following week to do the job properly. The place was not restful.

I spent most of the days on a beach east of the harbour. The sun glared brassily on the white sand and sometimes there was a strong, hot breeze that shrivelled the skin and brought a feeling of blisters to the lips. On those days the sea looked inviting, but the doctor had told me not to swim, and usually I sat in the shade of one of the ramshackle wooden cafés dotted along the foreshore.

The most frequented of them was owned and operated by a woman whom I will call ‘Annette.’ The café itself, although it had a gayer name, I will call ‘
La Voile Blanche.
’

It was a square matchboard building containing a rickety bar counter, a kitchen, and, at the back, Annette’s bedroom. The
terrasse
in front consisted of a wooden porch with a plaited bamboo roof. Beneath it, standing crookedly in the soft sand, were a few iron tables and some bentwood chairs. The staff consisted of a half-witted Arab girl named Fatima with purulent conjunctivitis in both eyes. There were several cleaner, more inviting-looking places along that stretch of beach. That it was
La Voile Blanche
that attracted most of the custom was due entirely to Annette herself.

She was a plump, moon-faced, motherly woman of about forty-five with dark, curranty eyes, a ready smile, and a lot of drab brown hair that shed hairpins like dandruff in the breeze. I never discovered her nationality. At various times I heard her use five different languages with apparent fluency, and I have no doubt that she could express herself adequately in many more. Probably, she had a bad accent in all of them.

She found out all that she wanted to know about me within a few minutes of my arrival. First, in her rather sibilant English, she offered to look after my money and papers while I went in to swim. I said that I was not swimming. She said that the swimming was perfect. I explained that I was convalescent. In deep concern, she sent Fatima for one of
La Voile’s
two decrepit deck chairs, found a place for me in the shade and gave me a brandy on the house. Then, standing beside me and murmuring sympathetically, she shaded her eyes with her hands and peered out anxiously across the Straits of Gibraltar.