I, Ripper

“A few years ago, I played the bright London scene, trying to scare up investors for this enterprise. At that time, I saw him quite a bit with a lovely girl on his arm. Handsome couple they were, quite mysterious but also somewhat enjoying their mystery. I do remember a reception at an embassy one night, they were much amused by some Hungarian professor who kept chasing the gal about, so smitten he was. I could see they enjoyed the game, and the little Magyar was hopeless in his romantic silliness. It was like watching a terrier attempt to mount a Great Dane. So no, he is a brilliant man, that I give you, and a charmer, too. I’d just, as principle among them folk, be sure to keep my hand on my wallet.”

After receiving that lukewarm blessing, I was off, with the proviso that if I heard of another Jack action, I’d find a telephone cabinet, get the details, and decamp posthaste.

But disappointment lurked ahead. It turned out rather too swiftly that I was no detective. I could make no headway, not with my sister Lucy trilling away in the studio and Mother watching me like a hawk about to pounce upon and devour a mouse. I retreated to my old haunting grounds, the reading room of the British Library, thinking its intellectual solemnity might inspire or provoke me.

Alas, even surrounded by the ghosts of Britain’s great writers and thinkers, I was all dried out. I was a pickle absent the brine, a desiccated raisin. No ferment, no bubbles, whatever inappropriate metaphor one could create, they all applied to me. My brain was bereft of electricity. I tried many things: I wrote on a big yellow tablet in Pitman’s shorthand “Jack” and then listed at speed all the theories I had heard from both high and low, from copper and reporter, from harlot and poet, and all seemed gibberish. I thought one might inspire something, but it didn’t. How did he move, how did he disappear, what were his attributes? Whatever I tried, my dim mind could not find its genius, if it had any; in the end, it merely revealed its fraudulence. My performance suffered from the want of energy and impetus.

I could see areas to check out, lines of inquiry that the coppers, even the purportedly great Inspector Abberline, the Scotland Yard star recently appointed to head the investigation, had not explored. Yet there was no energy in me, or even in the others, coppers, citizens, vigilante committees, the Home Office ministers, any of them. It seemed we were all locked in a box and couldn’t get beyond the obvious. We loved the image of Jack as skulker in a topper, gliding through the nonexistent fog on empty streets under gas lamps, caparisoned against the damp, cackling maniacally like a brute in a West End melodrama. Clearly that could not be him, and remaining manacled to the image was harmful to investigative enterprise. There was something pathetic in us that wouldn’t let us abandon our earlier conclusions: sailor, Jew, doctor, royal. That not one shred of evidence pointed to these solutions made us hungrier to cling to them. It was as if they formed a known coastline, and we sailors upon the sea of Jack were afraid to sail beyond the horizon, thinking we’d never find our way back.

So it was with both eagerness and trepidation that I called on Professor Dare on the appointed morning three days further along through October to discuss and assess. I hoped he had better luck than I did, and realized that I had in some way come to put too much hope upon the man, who would be, I wanted to believe, our savior in all this. I was a seriously confused and dazed young man.

He lived near the university, 26 Wimpole Street, in a grand house, larger than I expected. It spoke of private income, though he’d never said as much, being, I recognized, somewhat reticent on the topic of his real self. I knocked, feeling the chill of late autumn, as November was fast on, drawing my brown wool drabs about me, and a senior servant lady opened, looked me over with a Scot’s eye toward detecting common riffraff, and finally allowed, “Sir, the professor is awaiting you.”

I nodded, handing her my mac, and followed her to the study.

He was in a red velvet dressing gown with an ascot over heather trousers and velvet slippers with dragons embossed upon them, very fetching. He looked quite home-from-the-hunt. His pipe jutted furiously from his lean jaws, emitting briar vapor. His wrinkly blond hair was pushed back, his noble temples gleamed, his strong nose cut through the miasma like the scimitar it was, and behind his circular round spectacles, in a kind of dappled maple, his blue orbs took me in quickly.

“I fancy the house,” I said. “Well done.”

“Evidently my father did something quite remunerative. I meant to ask him about it but never got around to it. I didn’t enjoy his company much. Horrible fellow. However, I do enjoy having the money that I never earned myself. It makes life easy, frees me for my fun, and pays for all of this.”