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Authors: John R. King

BOOK: The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls
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I had ignored the papers since Susanna’s death, hearing only occasionally of petty crimes or routine murders. Nothing,
though, had amounted to a crime ring. It was an affront to the memory of Susanna.
I bought the edition and read the article as I carried it home. Once there, I set down Anna’s chocolates and drew out a piece of paper and wrote down the names of the men nabbed. Then I scoured the rest of the
Times
, looking for other such articles—and found them in plenty: “Prostitution Rampant on East Side,” “Bodies Found in Thames,” “Opium Ship Impounded.” By the end of that hour, I had gleaned two dozen names—and these were only the criminals that had been caught.
Taking my list of infamy, I crossed to Susanna’s rolltop desk, untouched these seven years, and opened it. Her quill lay just where she had left it on the night of her murder, and her thesis lay open to the precise page she had been staring at. There, the name Jeremy Bachman was underlined in red ink.
“It begins again.”
That night, after giving Anna her chocolates and sending her to bed, I started to transcribe Susanna’s thesis. Doing so was like copying the work of an artist. Every variable, every function, all the idiosyncratic twists and turns—these were her brushstrokes. By copying them, I trained my mind until they became second nature to me. Through Susanna’s grand thesis, she was indwelling my brain and living again.
In a month, the work of transcription was complete, and I began inserting the new names of the criminals who had taken the place of the old. Susanna whispered how. I outlined the structures as I understood them, and over the next few months, constructed from the papers a high-level view of the criminal underworld of London. All the old rackets had resumed. I glimpsed them first in the papers and then in police blotters and then in court documents and then in the city registrar’s office. The trail led from illegal activities to legal
ones, from blood money to laundered cash. I profiled the crime lords just as Susanna had, learning their minds, their personalities, their drives, their weaknesses. My data were reaching a critical mass. Now I needed only to find the lynchpin that would bring the whole mass crashing down.
On August 7, 1888, another headline stopped me: “Brutal Murder in Whitechapel.” I read the article, expecting to recognize the work of one of the thugs I’d profiled, but the murder was like nothing I had seen before:
Martha Tabram, a woman of ill repute, was found murdered this morning in the George Yard Building, Whitechapel. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times. According to police reports, Martha and another prostitute, Mary Ann Connolly, met a soldier and his companion last night and arranged to service them. Whilst Miss Connolly and the soldier walked up Angel Alley, Martha and her companion walked up George Yard. That was the last anyone saw of Martha’s companion, and Miss Connolly was unable to describe him.
Three features of this account terrified me. First, the incident occurred in Whitechapel, on the very street and among the very buildings where I had stayed for my time in London. Secondly, Martha Tabram worked for a madam who had been one of Petit’s own girls—one of Susanna’s housemates. This woman who had been murdered could have just as easily been my Susanna eighteen years back. But worst of all was the way she had been murdered—stabbed thirty-nine times. No one that I had ever profiled killed like that. Here was a new kind of murderer—who did what he did not for profit or for business but for erotic joy.
I let the newspaper slump from my jangled fingers and stared at the wall. A monster like this could not live in a
world with my Anna in it. Before I brought down the whole house of cards that had built up since Susanna’s death, I was going to track down this one killer.
I drew out a clean piece of paper and began listing what I knew: Whitechapel, Angel Alley, George Yard, soldier, Martha, Ann, thirty-nine stab wounds, soldier friend … . This would be a new calculus. Susanna’s work began with the person and ended with the crime, but I must go in the reverse. I must begin with the crime and find the killer.
When the second and third murders hit the papers, I at least had a name for my quarry: Jack the Ripper.
JACK THE RIPPER
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY:
 
M
artha Tabram haunted me. I imagined her murder—a woman on the street, desperate for money; a man with hidden motives engaging her; an empty apartment on George Yard; the squalor and his apology for it; her request that he place three crowns on the dresser … . It was a terrible fancy, but I could not banish it from my mind, could not imagine Martha as anyone but Susanna.
And always, in the end, she lay on the landing in a pool of blood.
“Father, what is it?” Anna asked one night.
I was sitting across from her in our parlor, the
Times
on my lap and my hands draped across the embroidered arms of the chair. She had caught me in the throes of another terrible vision. “Huh?”
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
I folded the
Times
. “Um, yes, I—I’m not feeling well.”
She rose and came to me. “It’s as if you’re back seven years ago, on that horrible day.”
I blinked in shock at her. “Yes, Anna. It’s like that. It’s very much like that.”
She sat down on the arm of the chair and placed her hand on my shoulder. “What is it, Father?”
I shook my head.
“I’m not a child anymore. You don’t need to protect me.”
“Oh yes, you are. You’re sixteen. And, oh yes, I do need to protect you.” She scowled at me, and I tried to explain: “Anna—men are monsters.”
“Not all men—”
“Many are. Too many.”
Her hand flitted to the paper and flicked it open. “What’s this? ‘Dear Boss’?”
I sighed deeply. She had found it, the trigger of my latest bout of terror. “A letter. The police hope someone will recognize the handwriting.”
I couldn’t stop her from reading—Anna was too headstrong, too smart—and some small part of me wanted her help. She leaned over me and began to read:
Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them til I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.
Yours truly,
Jack the Ripper
Don’t mind me giving the trade name.
 
PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it. No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now. ha ha
“Jack the Ripper,” Anna murmured.
“There have been three murders, Anna—women in Whitechapel, where your mother came from: Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman. Stabbed, throats slit, bodies mutilated, organs removed … . And this letter is either from the killer or from someone as sick as he.”
Anna breathed quietly. Her eyes studied the handwriting: the kinked
J,
the arrogant
R
, the smooth strokes of fingers as clever with ink as with blood. “Sent to the Central News Agency?”
“Yes,” I said, “which means he wants publicity. He talks of a ‘trade name,’ as if he is trying to sell something, Maybe it’s just a newspaperman trying to make a fortune. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a hoaxer—”
“Or maybe it’s real. This letter feels real. That bit about trade names just shows we’re dealing with a new type of killer. He’s in it for fame. Immortality.” Already Anna’s mind had found the same groove mine had been following. “What about the police?”
“Useless,” I snarled.
Anna turned from the paper and looked at me. “What about you, Father? I know you’ve been working this out.”
How much did she know? “Equally useless,” I said evasively. Anna frowned, and I felt the need to justify myself. “Oh, I’ve profiled each victim: they’re about forty, poor, with common-law marriages, supported with prostitution. The killings have happened in secluded corners of Whitechapel,
places accessible to the public. The crimes are stabbings and throat slashings and mutilations. So, I’ve profiled them … but what does any of that tell about the killer?” The question was rhetorical.
The answer was not. “It tells us quite a bit, I’d say.” Anna got up to pace the floor. “The letter writer’s sane, for one—though he’d like to be perceived as insane. An insane man wouldn’t hide his crimes this way. An insane man wouldn’t clean himself of blood or cover the blood up so well. He’d be noticed stalking away. This man isn’t noticed. He is even careful not to mail the letter when he is still … so to speak … red-handed.”
A chill went through me. Anna sounded just like her mother. She had parsed out in moments what had taken me days to deduce, and she was taking a rare delight in it.
“He’s intelligent, well educated,” Anna continued. “The handwriting is refined, and the spelling is, for the most part, correct. This isn’t a thug’s letter.”
“Anything else?”
“The man clearly has trouble with authority. He mocks the cleverness of the police but indicates that he expects someday to be caught by them, with words like ‘they wont fix me just yet’ and ‘shant quit ripping them til I do get buckled.’ He can’t control women who are his equals, so he’s ‘down on whores’—preying on the most destitute, helpless, and hopeless women. He controls them first with money and then with a knife, making sure to ‘rip’ them before they have time to ‘squeal.’ He wants to be a grand man—to have a trade name—but he’s really a skulker, afraid of police and prostitutes, both.”
“Yes, you’ve parsed it out,” I admitted.
Anna turned a triumphant smile on me. “We can catch this man!”
I shook my head. “No. No, not we, my girl. I couldn’t risk you.”
Wagging her finger at me, Anna came to sit again on the arm of the chair. “You
are
planning something, aren’t you?”
“I can’t let this man kill again.”
“You’re planning something right away.”
“I have to stop him—for the sake of your mother’s memory.”
“Yes.
My
mother. Which gives me the right to help.”
“Out of the question.”
“Last time, you left Mother behind because you thought she’d be safer.” Anna gripped my arm. “You can’t leave me behind.”
I shivered, thinking,
I damn well can
, but Anna had my number. For seven years, I’d regretted my actions that fateful night. I couldn’t leave Anna now.
“What are you planning?” she asked.
“He kills on the weekends—as one month ends and another begins. Tomorrow begins one such weekend. He kills in Whitechapel, and I have already booked passage for myself on a train that will arrive there at six tomorrow evening.”
“Book me as well.”
I held up my hand. “Given the killer’s monthly schedule, I deduce that he has work that keeps him away from Whitechapel for three weeks at a time. According to one account, the killer arrived in Whitechapel with a soldier friend. I’d guess the soldier to be a seaman—and our killer to be one of his comrades. Sailors are notorious for landing in port and seeking easy women. I’ve checked the manifests of all the Royal Navy ships that dock on the Thames along Wapping, and the steam cutter
Union Jack
has kept a schedule that perfectly matches the dates of the killings.”
Anna’s mouth dropped open. “The cutter
Jack
? Jack the Ripper?”
“Precisely,” I said. “And on the ship’s manifest, there are three men who answer to the description that you have given—well educated, intelligent, sane, socially awkward, trouble with authority and women: Bo’s’n Drew Beckworth, Ship’s Mate Greer Haines, and Master of the Tops John Harder.”
“And so, it’s merely a matter of arriving at Wapping before the ship docks, identifying these three men as they debark, and following them to see which will seek out a prostitute in Whitechapel.”
“All of them will seek out a prostitute in Whitechapel,” I replied, though it nettled me to think that I was speaking to my sixteen-year-old daughter this way. “We’ll have to follow these men to see which one of them attempts murder.”
“But there are only two of us, and there are three of them.”
“Luckily, Beckworth and Haines are best friends and constant companions. I’m betting that they were the two men seen together the night Martha Tabram was murdered.”
“So, you follow them, and I follow Harder.”
Here it was, the fateful decision. “Harder is the least likely suspect. He is master of tops—an authority with a problem with authority? But you cannot follow him, Anna—only watch from a safe distance.”
“Won’t we be conspicuous?” Anna asked. “A Cambridge don and his frilly daughter in Whitechapel?”
“We’ll be in disguise.”
 
ON THE thirtieth of September, 1888, Anna and I crouched in the lee of a little alleyway in Wapping. We wore clothes from a ragpicker’s stall—attered gray jerkins and trousers, boots yanked to midcalf, and misshapen felt berets. Even our faces were disguised, rubbed with ash and coal. We looked
like any other desperate blokes in the shouldering mass of humanity. No one would recognize us; we could hardly recognize ourselves.
The alley gave us a clear view of the docks, where the
Union Jack
even now settled in its berth. While deckhands hurled lines over the mooring blocks, other crew hoisted a section of rail from its posts and slid a gangplank through the gap. The great ramp boomed down onto the dock.
“They’re ready to debark,” I whispered. I’d brought a bottle of gin as a prop, though now I lifted it in my fist and took a little swig for courage.
Anna grabbed the bottle, took a mouthful herself, and sprayed gin across the alley. Coughing like a woman with consumption, she choked out, “You have your sap?”
I fished in my breast pocket and pulled out a little leather bag full of lead shot. “Yes. You have your nightstick?”
She opened the flap of her rucksack, showing ten copies of the
Times
folded over a small club.
“Follow at a distance. Don’t approach. Don’t make eye contact. Get out your papers and start to sell them. Notice every woman he approaches, and when he snares one, track them to whatever spot he chooses—”
“And blow the whistle,” Anna replied.
“Right. And keep blowing it until I or the police arrive.”
“I understand the plan.”
“You need to understand, also”—I reached up to touch the side of her face—“that I cannot lose you.”
Her voice was sullen in the alley. “I know.”
“Be careful.”
“You, too.” She flashed a smile. Then she looked up beyond the alley. “There’s my mark.”
I glanced out to see the crew of the
Union Jack
rambling down the gangplank. There, in the mass of them, was John
Harder. We recognized him from a photograph in the Royal Navy archives. A short man in blue bell-bottoms, Harder walked jauntily down the gangplank. Though it was a cool night and fog was beginning to rise from the fetid Thames, most of the sailors wore no coat. John Harder, master of the tops, however, wore a greatcoat—sufficient in length to hide a long blade and the gore that it brought out.
“Be careful,” I repeated.
Anna reached back to me, squeezed my hand, and said, “I’ll be all right.” She hoisted the rucksack on her back and ambled out onto the pavement.
I watched her go, strong and gawky like an adolescent boy. She was a born actress, just as her mother had been. “I love you,” I said to her back as she marched out into the street and vanished.
I did not have time to fear for her, though. My own marks descended the gangplank now. Ship’s Mate Greer Haines was easy to spot. He was a head taller than his mates, his hair was the color of straw, and his unclean teeth flashed in a perpetual smile. But the greatest evidence of his identity was the bosom friend at his side, Drew Beckworth, boatswain of the
Union Jack
. The man was squat, with long black hair in braids, a gold ring in his nose, and a silver tooth in his smile. One of these two men—the blond blade of grass or the black truffle—was my killer. I was sure of it.
They strode down the gangplank side by side, laughing, and I shambled up from my spot in the alleyway and went to lean on a wall of crumbling brick. Ahead of me, the tide of sailors moved like a river toward Whitechapel Road—the avenue that sluiced into the heart of the dissolute East Side. Haines and Beckworth simply rode the tide. With bottle in hand, so did I.

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