I, Ripper

A bit of a crowd, maybe ten to twenty pilgrims in black hats and shapeless jackets, Jews, sailors, maybe a worker or two, maybe some Germans, stood around the cluster of coppers, and so, caution never being my nature, I blazed ahead. I pushed my way through the crowd and encountered a constable, who put up a broad hand to halt my progress. “Whoa, laddy. Not your business. Stay back.”

“Press,” I announced airily, expecting magic. “Horn, Star.”

“Star! Now, what’s a posh rag like that interested in a dead Judy?”

“We hear it’s amusing. Come now, Constable, let me pass if you will.”

“I hear Irish in the voice. I could lock you up on suspicion of being full of blarney and whiskey.”

“I’m a teetote, if it matters. Let me see the inspector.”

“Which inspector would that be, now?”

“Any inspector.”

He laughed. “Good luck getting an inspector to talk to you, friend. All right, off you go, stand there with the other penny-a-liners.”

I should have made a squawk at being linked to the freelance hyenas who alit on every crime in London and then sold notes to the various papers, but I didn’t. Instead, I pushed by and joined a gaggle of disreputable-looking chaps who’d been channeled to the side and yet were closer to the action than the citizens. “So what’s the rub, mates?” I asked.

Fiercely competitive, they scowled at me, looked me up and down, noted my brown tweed suit and felt slouch hat and country walking shoes, and decided in a second they didn’t like me.

“You ain’t one of us, guv’nor,” a fellow finally said, “so why’n’t you use use your fancy airs to talk to an inspector.”

The holy grail of the whole frenzy seemed to be acknowledgment by an inspector, which would represent something akin to a papal audience.

“It would be beneath His Lordship,” I said. “Besides, the common copper knows more and sees more.”

Perhaps they enjoyed my banter with them. I have always been blessed at banter, and in bad circumstances a clear mind for the fast riposte does a fellow no end of good.

“You’ll know when we know, Lord Irish of Dublin’s Best Brothel.”

“I do like Sally O’Hara in that one,” I said, drawing laughter, even if I’d never been brothelized in my life.

“Sell you my notes, chum,” a fellow did say finally. He was from the Central News Agency, a service that specialized in servicing second- and third-tier publications with information they hadn’t the staff to report themselves.

“Agh, you lout. I don’t want the notes, just the information. I’ll take me own notes.”

We bargained and settled on a few shillings, probably more than he would have gotten from Tittle-Tattle.

“About forty, a Judy, no name, no papers, discovered by a worker named Charlie Cross, C-R-O-S-S, who lives just down the row, at three-forty A.M., lying where you see her.”

And I did. She lay, tiny, wasted bird, under some kind of police shroud, while around her detectives and constables looked for “clues,” or imagined themselves to be doing so by light of not-very-efficient gas lanterns.

“They’ve got boys out asking for parishioners to come by and identify the unfortunate deceased, but so far, no takers.”

“Cut up badly, is she?”

“First constable says so.”

“Why so little blood?” It was true. I had expected red sloppage everywhere, scarlet in the lamplight. Melodramatic imagination!

“I’m guessing soaked into her clothes. All that crinoline sops up anything liquid, blood, jizz, beer, wine, vomit—”

“Enough,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Now you know what we know.”

“Excellent. Will the coppers let us see the body?”

“We’ll see.”

I stood there another few minutes, until a two-wheeled mortuary cart was brought close to her, and two constables bent to lift her. They would transport her – now technically an it – to the Old Montague Street Mortuary, which was not far away.

“I say,” I said to the nearest uniform, “I’m from the Star. I’m not part of this jackal mob but an authentic journalist. It would help if I could see a bit, old man.”

He turned and looked at me as if I were the lad in the Dickens story who had the gall to ask for more.

“The Star,” I repeated as if I hadn’t noted his scowl and astonishment. “Maybe mention you, get you a promotion.”

I was naturally corrupt. I understood immediately without instruction that a little limelight does any man’s career a bit of good, and having access to it, which the penny-a-liners never did, was a distinct advantage.

“Come on, then,” he said, and although it wasn’t expressed, I could sense the outrage and indignation of the peasants behind me and rather enjoyed it. He pulled me to the mortuary cart, and as the fellows struggled to shove the poor lady into her carriage, he halted them, so that she was held at equipoise between worlds, as it were, and pulled back the tarpaulin.

I expected more from my first corpse. And if the boys thought I’d puke my guts up, I disappointed them. It turned out that, like so much else in this world, death was overrated.