I, Ripper

We rushed crazily across Commercial, hearing the shouts of drivers as we interrupted their rights to passage through the muddy concourse. Meanwhile, the rain pelted down, stinging our faces and forcing us to squint, but somehow we made it with no incident other than additional mud to our boots from the glop that had become the road surface. We arrived on that side of Commercial about fifty feet behind the happy twosome as they walked down the street, arm in arm. They had elected not to try Fournier but ambled down Commercial, past Christchurch and its towering steeple, and down another block. I got a good view, and I must say, if this were Jack, the public would be shocked.

Far from the creepy, anonymous skulker, his face cadaverous, his eyes haunted, his teeth pointed, this Jack was a merry seducer. We could see how totally engaged he was in charming her. Perhaps that was the plan, to gull her toward defenseless love with wit and then cut her down. Perhaps he enjoyed the moment when she saw the knife and knew the cad was her killer and the shock stunned her face.

But he was laying it on with a trowel. I could see him whispering in her ear intimately; evidently he was a wit and quite experienced in the art of making women comfortable (an attribute I sadly lacked): Her face, turned admiringly toward him, radiated rapture at his performance and affection for the man behind it. I watched as she seemed to gradually melt in to him, until they were not two walking side by side but one, of four-legged persuasion, in perfect unison and of one heart, easing their way down the sidewalk, too close to worry about costers’ stalls, too close to note the others passing them by at a far faster pace, and too intent on each’s response to the other to notice the two hooded gentlemen fifty feet behind them, matching perfectly their pace.

At last they came to a side street on the left, and I saw them put their heads together as they came to a halt, and then she giggled and he guffawed and they turned left.

“All right,” said the professor. “Now it gets dicey. Get that gun out so you don’t have to pull it while he’s cutting off your ears.”

I obeyed, sliding it out by one hand and easing it more or less under my mac, and we nodded, each took a deep breath, and steeled self against the upcoming. The rain was really falling now, cutting horizontally, propelled by angry wind, and a chill lay upon all and every. Perhaps hoarfrost in the morning? Who knew what morning would bring? At that moment, we took the corner hard and stepped into the blackness of an alley and saw in a second the figures of two people, enmeshed.

“Remember to cock the gun,” the professor whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE The Diary

November 7, 1888

his was quite new. Before, they were apparitions in the night. I didn’t see their faces clearly until I’d killed them, hardly to their advantage. The slack of death did a great deal to undercut beauty, if any beauty there had been to begin with.

But Mary Jane, in full bloom, was a lively, roundish specimen who generated goodwill and happiness wherever she went. She was a full-bodied thing, just a bit beyond the age at which you could call her a girl, and it was hard not to desire her, with her blond hair and her buxom figure and her happy smile for each and all.

After the barman’s description, I simply observed and was surprised that I hadn’t noticed her before. I didn’t bother asking anyone to point her out, since it was unnecessary. She was clearly visible from the window of the Ten Bells, so I didn’t have to reenter and risk the barman fixing my face in his memory, as I was sure he had not previously. I could see her sitting at a table with a gaggle of “the girls.” For all their forlorn history, they were a gay, larky lot who enjoyed each other’s presence, enjoyed the hospitality that the Ten Bells offered, and most of all enjoyed the glass of gin set before them. Like women of all sorts, from the Hindu Kush to the Amazon and the Danube to the Yellow and the Mississippi to the Colorado, they spoke a private language of gesture and enthusiasm, loved the thrill of gossip and slander, were united in their contempt for the men who had ruined so many of their lives, and brought out absolutely the best in each other. I could tell all that from their animated postures around the table.