I, Ripper

CHAPTER SIX Jeb’s Memoir

uccess is a narcotic. Experienced once, it must be had again and again. Pity the man who has it young and can never regain it. His must be a parched, bitter life. As for me, the week of September 1 through 7 was the best I’d ever had, and it strengthened my resolve to never, ever return to being the nonentity I had been my first thirty-two years.

I owe it all to Jack, though the name would not be affixed into eternity for another month or so. It’s terrible, but as truth is the guideline here, I must nevertheless confess it. Jack’s depredations made Jeb’s successes possible, and fixed Jeb on the course his life would take, giving him the sense of importance that he would never again cease to maneuver in search of.

Brilliance followed brilliance. I grabbed a nap in the Star office and watched with utter satisfaction as the MAD BUTCHER SLAYS WOMAN editions sold out, went back to what O’Connor said was “replate” seven times, and effectively not only invented but drove the story onward.

Such energy and determination. Such tirelessness. Jeb was the hero of the day, the ace reporter who had found and amplified the case for the millions of shopkeeps and -girls who comprised the London population. I was their thrill machine, I was their fear of darkness and sharp instruments, I suppose I was the swollen penis or the wetted cunny that they could never admit to having had. Jeb brought all this to them. It was a shame, then, that I had no idea what I was doing.

“Get yourself to the London Hall of Records,” Henry Bright instructed. “Find an amiable clerk to look up the name of the lady. Her official records should have leads – if she has children, an address, a husband, real or common-law. Go to them, not wasting a ha’penny’s worth of time, and chat them up. Stop off here first, pick up an artist, he will accompany you to sketch the faces. We need to put their faces in the newspaper.”

“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.