I, Ripper

“Those ideas are hardly held anywhere in the world except in certain liberal reform circles, very small but very passionate. Not at all the place where one would find a soldier or intelligence agent of much battle experience. So your point has to be that he has been exposed, somehow, somewhere, sometime, to those ideas, but more important, to people who espouse them, for it is not the sort of inconvenient passion one would absorb merely from reading. You’d have to live it, feel it heavy in the air, indulge in it at length as an assumption, not an argument. And where would we find people of such ideas? I cannot see him gadding about among the better sort of intellectual circles in Bloomsbury, can you?”

“No, I do not see that.”

“Only one possibility remains. In the church. Possibly in family, given a rector as father or brother, possibly by marriage to a Quaker woman.”

“You have it, sir. Exactly.”

“A soldier – raider, rather – experienced in Afghanistan, highly evolved military skills, dyslexic, Sandhurst, yet the son of a pastor or minister of some sort.”

“Ecce Jack.”

I realized then: He had made his sale.

Against his campaign, my little foray into detectivism seemed trivial.

“All right,” I said, “it’s quite brilliant, so much further along than anything anyone else has said. You have a genius for this sort of analysis, I must admit. I am humbled. Why, it is as if you are Sherlock Holmes himself.”

“Who?”

“The detective Sherlock Holmes. The genius who can decode a crime scene brilliantly, sift through clues with ease, point out the plot, its purpose, and its perpetrator. In Conan Doyle’s book A Study in Scarlet.”

“Never heard of it. As I said, let’s just stop the gutting of the whores. Now I turn to you for practicality.”

“Perhaps I can at last contribute,” I said. For even as I had been listening and recording in Pitman, I had been, in a different part of my mind, seeking utility for these new ideas.

“I await patiently,” he said. “As you know, I am somewhat bereft of practicality. I am an expert on one thing alone, the voice.” So Holmesian!

“My thought,” I said, “is that I am, after all, a journalist. While the Star is not the best of all papers in London, even if it is one of the loudest, my connection to it secures me entry into the journalists’ society. On our paper or on another, there has to be a fellow who has made it his speciality to cover issues of war. He’s been to many, he knows the officers and the civilians who supervise them well, and most of all, he already has cultivated a network of private informants. He is well known at Cumberland House, army headquarters. My idea would be to locate this man and somehow entice him to our aid. We would start with the broadest categorization of what you have said. We are looking for someone recently retired from active duty, with connections to intelligence, who is privately known by those who are privy to such things, as a superb operative in mufti, particularly in Afghanistan, who has a gift for languages and a reputation for that which we will call ‘efficiency,’ it being understood that such a word connotes the willingness to kill if necessary. He has been, further, much exposed to the horrors of battle and mutilation as performed in that hellhole, perhaps his mind subtly addled by it.”

“Excellent,” said Professor Dare.

“If we can get a list of such, some being more closely matched to the criteria than others, we can our own selves identify them and continue to winnow, by which method we can determine if the other markers are present: the dyslexia, the religious childhood, the superb night vision, the physical aspect of slightness, perhaps even the possession of poor Annie’s rings, though that may be too much to be wished. In that way, we can ultimately identify the one man who matches the template with perfection. Police notification would follow, then arrest, and we bathe in glory. I do like the glory part.”

“Then you may have it all, sir.”

“I am no hog. I will share, I swear.”

“And we’d better hurry, Jeb. After all, the quarter-moon fast approaches, on October 28. Our soldier of night will soon pursue another mission.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN The Diary

October 26, 1888

t would soon be time again, since the campaign had obligations that needed to be met. I went on search, being careful to use what I had learned: I needed crowds – of Johns, citizens, and Judys – into which to melt anonymously. I needed quick access to dark streets. I needed at least one and possibly two escape routes. I needed to be cognizant of the police constables and their patrolling. I had to negotiate all these factors brilliantly, weighing them and finding a perfect balance, and remain aware that the task was made infinitely more difficult because Warren had put so many more blue bottles on the street, thinking the dragnet, the sheer number of uniformed men, plus a nice reward, would do the trick.