I, Ripper

“No, no,” he said. “Since you’re so damned good at fetching records, you might as well return to the municipal seats and do similar searches on the other two. At a certain point, say three days hence, we’ll meet and consider next moves. Does that feel efficient? And if Major MacNeese proves uninteresting, we’ll quickly move on to Major Pullham, time being an element in our urgency.”

“Very good. If there’s any ‘promising’ behavior, we’ll mark it and make a determination then.”

“Yes, remember that Jack, by my theory, is a scout first and foremost. If he has a plot running, he’ll reconnoiter first. That should be behavior easy to recognize and give us ample preparation time. He never improvises; he’s got it all well thought out in advance.”

Excellent plan. However, in practice it was not nearly so neat. What we hadn’t figured on was the utter boredom of detective work, and for highly cognitive men with playful imaginations always on the lookout for spontaneous wit, unusual images, irrational occurrences of moment, the odd cloud formation, a beautiful face, a well-cut suit, a particular shade of color on the hubcap of a cabriolet, a tone in the air that reminded one of a particularly thrilling passage in Wagner, all the little irrelevancies that life regularly throws up to the overbusy of mind, the ordeal was degrading, exhausting, and excruciating. Detectives we might be playing at, but detectives we were not. We were either too intelligent or too silly.

Major MacNeese was married with two small children. His wife was a beauty but of a class that probably would have prevented a further rise in the army or society even had he not gone off on s/ID. He had secured, through connections, a fine job as assistant supervisor of the shipping department of the East India Company and therefore worked in their extensive rooms located immediate to Canary Wharf. It was such a fine job, surely a thousand a year, and it came to him so quickly that we quickly concluded it was part of some larger arrangement. We believed that his true employer, using his contacts, was an intelligence department attached to some governmental concern, army, foreign office, some tiny room in a Whitehall cellar, and he was possibly in charge of shipping men of low repute or criminal intent, purloined military documents, currency for payroll of spies, perhaps guns and powder, even dynamite, into or out of Britain under the guise of his civilian career. That made sense but was not terribly interesting, for a shipping executive of secret dynamite is still first and foremost a shipping executive. Ho-hum, and pardon me for nap time.

Major Pullham was more interesting. His employment, again gotten no doubt through contacts, was with the manufacturing concern of Jacoby, Meyers & Devlin, which specialized in selling various metal accoutrements to the army, such as mess-kit items, lanyards, belt buckles, and water bottles. Since he was the cavalryman of high renown – 8th Irish Hussar, recall, with all those initials scattered in his name’s wake – he knew all the generals of horse and all the procurement processes and was able to maintain his firm’s contracts for horse-related metal implements, such as bits, spurs, cinch buckles, and so forth, that kept the British hussar and light or heavy horseman firmly in saddle as he galloped through waves of Pathan, whisking them down with the sharp edge of his Wilkinson. Pullham had married above station to a wealthy and connected woman and was a sort of smooth charmer, being a handsome man with good manners, a courtly fashion, a ready wit, and a comfort that eased his way among the betters of society with whom he mingled on a daily basis.