Anatomy of Evil (2 page)

In Minories Street there was a stable with which I was acquainted that was still open though it was nearly midnight. I paid the men handsomely to brush and blanket Juno and I gave her a feed bag of oats. I headed north on foot, watching the faces of the few people who moved furtively along, heads down and hands in pockets or clutching their clothes around them. Like Cassius, they had a lean and hungry look. The thought penetrated my mind that I had no business being here. I was courting disaster. My bed awaited me a few miles south, yet stubbornly I refused to return there. I would see this through.

The Britannia was a shabby-looking public house at the corner of Dorset and Commercial Streets. A concertina was being played inexpertly within. When I entered, I could smell stale beer, rank cigars, and the odor of unwashed humanity. It made me want to gag, but in the past year or two I had learned to suppress such impulses. It was a natural part of life, a smell common to thousands of public houses. I tried to keep my emotions in check and not let my imagination get the best of me.

I spotted my quarry at a table near the far back. A homburg hat was pulled low over his eyes. He looked simultaneously nervous and dispirited. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought he didn’t want to be there. I ordered two half pints of bitter and carried them through to him at the table.

“Thomas!” he cried.

“Israel,” I replied. “Are you ready? It seems a perfect night for it.”

Israel Zangwill was my closest friend. When we had first met he was a teacher at the Jews Free School. Now he had become a reporter for the
Jewish Chronicle.
Israel was Whitechapel born and bred. He knew it better than anyone: its history, its cartography, and every crime ever perpetrated here. But there was something more. A year before, a girl he loved, the talented but melancholy poetess Amy Levy, had killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven. It had pushed his gentle soul to the edge.

Taking a gulp of beer, I made a face and set it down again. It had been watered down and probably given a jolt of opium to pep it up as well. I should have expected no less from such an establishment. Zangwill did not seem to notice and drank half the glass in one pull. He belched and excused himself.

“Made in Whitechapel, you know,” he said. “Not three minutes away. You can’t beat Albion Brown Ale.”

“If they can’t kill you one way, they’ll do it another.”

“Have you ever had that feeling as if you are children playing at being adults? I feel as if my father is going to catch me and tan my hide for being out so late.”

“That’s odd,” I replied. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m a hundred years old.”

Israel is not what one might call a handsome man. He is hatchet-faced and thin, and his eyes are bulbous, but those eyes see everything and the information he takes in is strained through his volatile brain, down his arm and into his pen. He is like a Jewish Dickens, combing the streets in the odd hours, taking impressions, crusading for better conditions, and occasionally getting himself in trouble.

“Have you got it?” Israel asked in too loud a voice, as if we were on stage and he wanted the audience to know he was Conspirator Number One.

I opened my coat and let him spy the Webley Mark III whose handle was sticking out of my breast pocket. “You?”

Zangwill reached down between his ankles and lifted a bull’s-eye lantern. As I watched, he opened the hatch and lit the candle with the help of a box of vestas. His long fingers shook. He was clearly nervous.

“We could still call this off, you know,” I said. “Be sensible, go home to bed, and never speak of this again.”

“We’ve never been sensible before,” he replied. “I see no reason to start now.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said, slapping him on the shoulder. “Can you feel it? I think no woman in Whitechapel is safe tonight.”

“Then let us get started,” he replied.

I tossed a few pence on the table more from habit than thankfulness, and we left. We moved easily through the district with the tails of our coats flapping behind us. Pasting articles into scrapbooks might be good for some, and I’m sure it was a sensible and sagacious pastime, but we were young and needed to
do
something. I had seen my share of death in the past, occasionally in these very streets, but this was different. A lunatic was on the loose and would likely be killed or captured by the police within a day or two. Why should they get all the credit? If we could track the killer down ourselves, hold him at gunpoint, and deliver him to the police, we’d be heroes. People would pay to read Israel’s account of it in the
Chronicle.
I planned to confess all to the Guv the following morning, but of course, as the saying goes, it is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

“Buck’s Row School is up ahead there,” Israel said, pointing down the street. “That’s where the first woman, Mary Nichols, was found. By the wall there, against the playground.”

Reaching our destination, he opened the shutter on the dark lantern in his hand and a small circle of yellow light splashed onto the cobblestones. The soil left by dozens of horses over the summer had filled the spaces in between the cobbles and it was this soil which had absorbed and still held the blood from the first victim. Cynic that I was, I reasoned that since then the ground had probably been salted with fresh blood—pig’s blood—by guides hoping to make some money. Since the first murder, it should have been washed away by the rain.

I had only the vaguest idea how the poor woman had been savaged. That news had been kept back from the newspapers, and one had to attend the inquest to hear the full details read aloud. In print, having been so bold as to state that the unfortunate’s dress had been lifted over her waist, a newspaper could be no more explicit without risking censure for indecency. Of course, there were other ways to sell copy. As I recall, one industrious journal said that the first victim’s head had been sawn clean off, hanging by a mere flap of skin.

It was Death, you see, which had brought us out here in the middle of the night. The Age Old Mystery. Nothing makes us so alive as seeing that another has died while we yet live. After five or six millennia to deal with the matter, we still had come no closer to understanding or accepting it, that we too are mere mortals and sometime our own number will come, and after … what?

“Are there many unfortunates along this street, so close to a school?” I asked.

“They don’t ply their wares during daylight, if that’s what you mean.”

“But they actually perform their business right here in the street?”

“In the alleyways nearby, where it is dark as pitch,” Israel said, pointing toward a narrow court.

“Without a bed, or walls, or privacy?”

“This isn’t Claridge’s, Thomas. Privacy is expensive and a bed is what these women are attempting to make the money to afford. It’s fourpence for a bed in the tenements around here. Well, not a bed, per se. A blanket on a hard floor in a doss-house, more like.”

“These women lead very pathetic lives,” I said.

“Until they meet very pathetic ends. But most of them are drinkers, you see. If they didn’t need the drink to begin with, they’d have stayed with their husbands and been respectable. The need made them go out in the streets after midnight and ply their foul trade.”

“What about their fancy men? What do you call them? Pimps?”

“This type of woman wouldn’t have any. No pimp would waste his time on a woman past forty on her way out of this world. Too much trouble keeping them sober, you see. And it’s no use trying to extort them for money because this kind rarely has a penny. When they do, it’s right into the nearest establishment, like the Britannia, for a glass o’ gin, please. Their only purpose in life is to get drunk as swiftly as possible. Their only solace is oblivion.”

“And there are hundreds of such women in Whitechapel?”

Israel nodded. “Perhaps thousands. Odd women. That is, without a mate to care for them, on their own, forced to fend for themselves any way they can. Living in the city without a skill to fall back on. They haven’t the talent of a Bernhardt, or the beauty of a Langtry. When they finally struck the ground, it was a hard fall, I’m sure.”

Suddenly, this didn’t seem as much a lark as I had hoped it would be. It was tragic. “So, have you ever…?”

“No!” he said, shaking his head at the idea. “The Torah forbids it. And what if you catch a dose? Who wants to end one’s days in a madhouse because of a few moments’ pleasure? No, no, believe me, these women, worn out and unappealing, and half inebriated as they are, could only attract a certain sort of man. Someone who, like themselves, has fallen in life to a state of brutality. A man just holding on to his life, perhaps already a victim of vices and diseases that have softened his brain. A brute with a fierce temper, or as you said already, a lunatic.”

“This district looks to me like a prime example of natural selection. The weak, the aged, the infirmed, all fall prey to the wolf culling the herd.”

“You had better not let your Baptist employer hear you quoting Darwin.”

“And you, I suppose, believe the best solution against the fate of such women is socialism.”

“Of course!” he cried. “Decent housing and regular food. An occupation, leading to pride in work. A spirit of community here in Whitechapel, providing improvements such as regular street lamps. Did you know, Thomas, that there are streets in Whitechapel so dark and dangerous that even the police travel in pairs? In this, the most modern city in the world!”

“It’s a pretty speech,” I said. “Unfortunately, our theoretical drab will throw over her decent housing and free food in order to step into a pitch-dark alleyway with a perfect stranger to make enough money to get herself roaring drunk. Until such time as there is a cure for John Barleycorn, all the speeches by the Worker’s Union won’t make a bit of difference.”

“You’re a harsh critic, Thomas Llewelyn.”

“Perhaps, but then I don’t see General Booth’s Salvation Army turning the East End into a Paradise with fountains and swans, either.”

“There it is, just up ahead,” he said, opening the lantern again. He was out of breath, though only twenty-four. He spent much of the day seated in a chair and never took exercise, save when I dragged him out on an errand. “We are in Spitalfields now.”

“I don’t know how you keep these districts straight,” I said.

“You’re one to talk. Is your office in Whitehall, Charing Cross, or St. Martin-in-the-Fields?”

“All of them, I think.”

“Tut-tut. Rozzers. We’d better go this way.”

I looked ahead and saw two constables waving people away from a doorway. I feared we wouldn’t get to see where the second victim was slain that very morning.

“Come with me,” Israel whispered.

He led me down a series of alleyways until we found ourselves in a dead end.

“Help me up,” he said.

I cupped my hands and lifted him against a fence. After a moment, he tapped me on the shoulder.

“Right. The victim was found on the other side of this fence, between the steps and the fence itself. Let me help you.”

Eagerly, I peered over. The blood was still fresh, dark and slick as ink, for the murder was less than a day old. It was a deserted stoop in a back yard connecting several buildings together. Until that morning it had been an anonymous spot people passed without thought. Now the police had to keep people away from it.

“Oy! You lot! Get down from there!” a constable cried, and Israel and I beat a hasty retreat. We ran through a warren of streets in the north of Whitechapel, an area known as Mile End New Town. If the police had pursued us, they gave up rather easily. Eventually, we collapsed against a brick wall in Underwood Street, huffing and puffing, with sore feet and stitches in our sides. We had the street all to ourselves.

“My word,” I said, when I caught my breath, “what is that stink?”

“What do you think? No one has an extra penny for the street sweeper here. Anyone with a proper broom goes into the City and tries to take over a corner there.”

“Is it all as bad as this?”

“No, some of it is just neglected. Sort of shabby-genteel, you know. It’s mostly our crowd here, the Jews. The Ashkenazi from the Jewish Pale in Warsaw, or Moscow, or Berlin, chased out by the pogroms of the tsar and the kaiser. We are struggling, but give us time. Some of us will rise, and when we do, we’ll put a fresh coat of paint on these buildings and mend the fences and sweep these odiferous streets. There is no more gentrifying power than a synagogue full of worshipers.”

“Israel, I came here to catch a killer. If you’re going to start preaching, I’d rather be sleeping at home in my nice, cozy bed.”

“I’m sorry, Thomas, but the Whitechapel Killer is not a jack-in-the-box, to pop out of his hole at command.”

Just then I sensed that we were not alone in the darkness. The street was empty, and I heard no sound that suggested someone was there. It was more a feeling. The hackles on the back of my neck rose. Had Mary Nichols had such a feeling before the blade cut into her throat? Did Annie Chapman realize she was not alone right before her life was snuffed like a candle?

Israel suddenly lifted his dark lantern in my face, blinding me with the light.

“Thomas, look out!” he cried.

A crushing hand seized my neck in a viselike grip, cutting off all air to my lungs. The last thing I saw was the lantern falling to the ground, as my friend fought off the figure in black that was choking the life from him.

CHAPTER TWO

We were lifted bodily, both of us, and shaken like rats in a terrier’s jaws. Granted, neither of us is over nine stone, but still, we were two grown men. He was real, I told myself; the Whitechapel Killer is real! We had come in search of him, but he had found us instead! He carried us, still hanging by the collars of our jackets, into the light provided by a sputtering gaslight from a nearby tenement.

“And what are you rascals up to, capering about in the middle of the night?” Cyrus Barker demanded in his low Scots accent.

If it is possible to collapse without actually touching the ground, then we did. I went limp with relief, and would have spoken if he didn’t actually have me by the neck.