I, Ripper

My guilt was known. It was pointed out. The jig was up. I had returned to the scene and paid the price. All that is true.

It is also true that I was discovered by a dog.

I do not know what higher sensitivities these creatures have, but this one knew. She saw into and through me. She had me, whether by rude particle of blood scent adhering to my flesh (I had meticulously burned all the clothes I wore that night and bathed scrupulously) or some instinctive warning system that highlights predators, or maybe by shrewd analysis of my uninterest in the site of the body for the channel of escape, I know not.

She was a small Scottish West Highland terrier, dead white to proclaim virtue and justice, proving that symbolism of times appears in reality just as readily as it does in fiction, poetry, or art. Her bark was not alarming, but it was insistent; truly heroic, she pulled hard to assault me, plunge her fangs into my flesh, and bring me down.

“Maddy, my goodness, you must stop at once, oh, bad lady, bad bad girl,” yelped her embarrassed master, a grandmotherly type under a straw bonnet with more than a few ribbons, posies, and bows, another murder gawker embarrassed to be stirred into human contact by her doggie’s misbehavior.

But Maddy knew and would not relent. She screamed aloud, “It’s he, it’s Jack, it’s the knifer, the ripper, the killer, oh, you foolish people, if you would but look into this blackguard’s soul, you would see his evil and smell the blood he spilled not thirty feet away!” Unfortunately, since she spoke only terrier, the doltish humans about her paid no attention whatsoever and went about their nervous murder-site gawking.

The mistress bent and scooped up Maddy and hugged the squirming thing to her bosom, but Maddy kept trying to alert civilization to the threat it faced, although to no effect.

“Sir, I am so sorry, I cannot fathom what has got into her today, she is usually so polite.”

“Madam,” I said, “do not be concerned. Dogs, children, and women universally loathe me, but on the other hand, gentlemen do not much care for me, either.”

“Well, sir, at least you’re not a Mason!” said the lady, a rather game riposte, I thought, and it brought our conversation to a pleasing close, as we had chatted in the enjoyable language of high irony. I bent, bowed, removed my bowler in a sweeping, overmagnanimous gesture to signify theatrical-sized graciousness, and turned smartly to abandon the square.

I walked to the church passage, and it was much narrower by day than I recalled by night, with the brick walls pressing in fiercely but a meter or so apart. As I meant to make egress, I turned and saw that the lady had gone back to her ruminating on the events of the square, but Maddy, ever vigilant, had me fixed in a baleful glare.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Jeb’s Memoir

as he our Sherlock Holmes? Could the long-hoped-for genius intellect at last be entering the fray? Lord, I did so hope. I also, ambitious wretch, did so hope that I’d be the one to take it all down.

Two days hence I met him at the Reform Club, at Pall Mall next to the Traveler’s Club, in the high club land of central London. His tweeds were magnificent, flowing like the land forms of the heather itself, and again he seemed utterly unimpressed by the figure he cut with his wavy blond hair, his aquiline nose, his round specs, and his general air of Porthos amid the corpses of freshly skewered Richelieu swordsmen.

“Do sit down,” he said, “and pay no attention to the various Irish revolutionaries about you, as they are not apt to plant a bomb in the only place in London where you can have a good dish of lamb stew.”

“As I speak with a wee but insistent Dublin brogue,” I said, “I suspect they would not explode until I left the premises, for fear – misplaced, of course – of blasting one of their own.”

I knew there were no revolutionaries about, not even many radicals, rather that wan and forlorn tribe of misbegotten and guilt-bearing mere liberals, who wanted change at only a slightly increased pace over the progress of a turtle across the Sahara.

We sat in a corner nook of the great cigar- and pipe-smoked room, amid lustrous mahogany walls lined with books and portraits of various liberals from Anne Boleyn on down, and he offered me a cheroot and a drink, the first of which I took, the second of which I turned down.

“Probably a wise decision,” he said. “I have too many times awakened after a night with friend Jack Barley in the arms of a whore whom I promised to marry and thereby render licit. And bourgeois. Believe me, it takes more than phonetics to get out of that one with phiz intact.”