I, Ripper

He was an idiot. For one thing, it is true of military and of police intelligences and also of engineers – and Warren was all three – that they conspicuously prepare for that which has already happened as opposed to that which has not. In my amblings around Whitechapel, I saw that the coppers were flooding the areas where I had already struck. They thought I was such a slave to habit (and as stupid as they were) that I would do the same.

It took no genius to look at the map and determine that aside from Long Liz Stride’s encounter, which had been governed by special rules, all the others had been north of the Whitechapel/Aldgate axis. So that was where the genius Warren deployed most of his troops. You could not go for a stout, or an apple from a coster’s stall, along the Whitechapel High Street without bumping into a constable with his ding-dong lantern and his whistle on rope. There were so many, they had naught to observe but themselves!

Meanwhile, as one progressed toward the southeast, the coppers seemed to dissipate, to thin, the spaces between them wider and yet wider again, block by block. At first I thought it might be a trap and that in some cellar along Stepney Way or Clavell Street he might have secreted a hundred men, ready to leap out upon the whistle and begin the hunt along the byways of the district’s quadrant, oriented southeast by compass. But he hadn’t the wit. Was the man stupid? Maybe he was merely slow and would eventually comprehend his own folly, but he lacked the adaptability and agility that the modern police executive needed. And who should know better than I?

My plans thus moved my area of operation away from the well used, down toward the river. For Jack, the area was virgin.

However, it did seem slightly different in element. Yes, dollies plied their trade down this way, but the road inclined toward the port, where the great ships bearing their Oriental loot tied up, and so the milieu became not only seedier but more infused with the accoutrements of maritime enterprise. The smell of riverine damp, that is, a kind of swollen density of water suspended in the atmosphere, seemed to fall like a curtain on these twisty streets, and the gist of retail somewhat altered, now presenting sailor’s dives with names like the Mermaid or the Bosun, or South of Fiji or Pitcairn’s Paradise, and as well what had to be Chinese opium dens (the smell outside started one hallucinating!) and places where tattoos could be inked on arms, chests, or, as I saw on one fellow, faces. If one looked during daylight hours down certain streets, or alleys or walkways between the humble buildings, one could see the maze of spars, masts, and rigging, the gathered, roped sails and crow’s nests of these behemoth vessels, as they berthed in the Western Docks in Wapping, or even farther out, on that strange near-island of wet creeks, swampland, and riverettes called the Isle of Dog, which offered a meander to the great River Thames and bent it around its own promontory and presented its own endless dockage. It was called Canary Wharf, where the East India Company, that grand circus of larceny and exploitation by armed robbery, unloaded, and where all the spices and silks and fruits and rice and whatnot were removed to be sold to poor Johnny English at sixteen times their cost in rupees or yen, and Johnny considered himself bargaineering in the process. This was the great mountebank’s engine that sustained our tight, lovely little land and, other than the dank warrens of Whitechapel and its brethren, kept it all green and happy, its victim-citizens as dim and blissful as mudlarks.

I mention this because it also somewhat changed the nature of the crowds one encountered, again a part of the element. One no longer saw the predominance of the top hat or the derby but, instead, the strange plumage of all the many jack-tars, the endless types of sailor caps the crew jerries wore. They came from all nations under these vagabond coverings, and one saw rounder eyes, bluer eyes, squintier eyes, darker skin, lighter skin, bigger skulls, smaller skulls, hair of blond and black and red and even shaved – the Russkies, I’m guessing, who like to show their skull in contrast to flowing mustachios, meant to frighten, as they were all huskies to boot. Conversely, one saw fewer and fewer of the square, dull symmetrical faces of typical Englishmen. I fancied I could smell foreign spicings in the air, and even the costers offered fruit from different parts of the globe, some strangenesses that I could not identify as being from our very planet. I was quite convinced that I was no longer in England, for the babel of foreign voices.