I, Ripper

The third fellow, Colonel Woodruff, was probably the bravest but also evidently the most severe. He lived alone, a dull little man in black, mainly, and had no true employ except his own intellectual curiosity. He spent his days in the British Library reading rooms (I had never noticed him, nor he me), where he was quite happily compiling the first English-Pashto dictionary and grammar, a document that was needed desperately by at least four other human beings on the planet. As I say, drab, with a clerk’s mien. However, he was an old hand, having been east since 1856, survived the siege of Lucknow during the Great Mutiny, and commanded a battalion of foot of the 66th at Maiwand, which stood off several separate horse charges; when our positions were broken, he was able, by shrewd land navigation and language skills, to get all his survivors back to Kandahar. Not satisfied with that accomplishment, he went back into the field in mufti and, for a week after the battle, brought stragglers back in. Then he and he alone made the desperately dangerous journey to Kabul, where he became Fred Roberts’s head scout and led the Roberts relief column back to raise the siege at Kandahar. It was he, on the night before the battle, who scouted the Khan’s positions and made Roberts understand how to attack. After the rout, he was awarded the VC for that, although he could have been awarded it for any of the actions of the previous week. After all of that, he went s/ID for the next full five years, doing God knows what in the high Khyber Mountain passes. To look at him, you’d have thought he owned a teashop or was a third-grade railway clerk.

So we rotated among them over the week before the approach of the first November occurrence of the proper moon phase, I doing more of the digging through files, Dare more of the on-scene reportage. I must say, he had a talent for it and seemed to enjoy it rather more than I would have thought. “It’s so nice to be among actual human beings in actual society for a change,” he said enthusiastically, “instead of locked amid books, no matter how stimulating they might be.”

We learned, first of all, that if no man is a hero to his valet, neither is he one to his detective. MacNeese, for example, while the exemplary servant to his employers, both nominal and subrosa, and to his family, occasionally bought a French postcard or two on his way home, for private titillation and release, we presumed. We weren’t sure what to make of it; perhaps, though there were no indications, were he Jack, the pictures would render him tumescent, and he needed that impetus to do the murders. Admittedly, it was far-fetched; more probably, the occasional secret release calmed him and turned him away from the temptations he might succumb to otherwise on his daily to-and-fro through the lascivious streets of Whitechapel.

As for Pullham, it was sex as well. (How much of human activity is infiltrated by desire! That was a lesson well learned!) However, it was sex after the fashion of an adventurer, which was clearly his personality type. He had two mistresses, one of whom his wife had no knowledge of and one of whom she did. He saw them regularly over lunchtimes, skipping the midday repast and thereby keeping his figure lean and dashing. Once he saw both of them on the same day, taking a late dinner with Lady Meachum. He was insatiable. It was observed that at any chance encounter with an attractive woman, he immediately went into full seducer’s mien, came alight, as it were, attentive, his hands seeming to accidentally touch and caress his prey, an invitation whispered into her ear, this to servant girls, clerks, shopkeeps, and high ladies as they came across his prow. The man was a satyr. Again, that might be a Jack indicator, on the theory that for a woman hunter, slaying the rude street girls was a refined pleasure to be enjoyed after having grown tired of endeavors involving mere sex conquest in the field. But again, it was kind of silly, wasn’t it? This man had everything, and if material values were important to him (marrying Lady Meachum seemed to indicate they were), why would he risk it all by knifing the odd tart during the crescent moon? I could make no sense of that issue. The other aspect that made him unlikely was energy. The fellow was engaged at all waking hours, in mandates of career, mandates of society via Lady Meachum’s importuning, or mandates of his perpetually engorged chuz, which seemed to guide him whenever his schedule would allow it.