Anatomy of Evil (7 page)

“Has a file been started for Annie Chapman yet?”

“Just arrived, sir. At the moment, Chief Detective Inspector Donald Swanson has part of it on his desk. Postmortem results aren’t in.”

“No doubt he’s in Whitechapel this morning.”

“At ‘H’ Division, conferring with Inspector Abberline. He’s pretty well moved in there for a while.”

The Guv nodded, a sign that he had heard and was turning something over in his mind.

“Sign here, if you will, your names and the file number,” Kirkwood said. “‘Time in’ is 11:31.”

I signed for us and received the Nichols file. We pulled out a couple of noisy chairs and removed the top of the box. Inside were manila folders and one of green pasteboard which proved to contain the postmortem. I’d have looked at that first, but understood my employer should have the choice. Luckily, he picked up the initial report, leaving the green folder for me.

Mary Nichols, or “Polly,” was a forty-three-year-old prostitute who was murdered in Buck’s Row on August 31, scarcely a week ago. Her body was found at 3:40
A.M.
by a pair of carters: Charles Cross and Robert Paul. At first they thought her only passed out drunk in the street, for the body was still warm, but when the police were brought and a bull’s-eye lantern shone upon her face, one could see that her throat had been cut and her clothing soaked through with blood. Worse yet, when the body was taken to the mortuary in Old Montague Street and her body stripped and examined, they discovered she had been disemboweled as well.

The Yard had been caught out in many ways during this first case. The locale of the murder had been washed clean of blood by the time the first inspector arrived. The body, once it had arrived at the mortuary, was cleaned by attendants and the clothing thrown into a pile. There was so little blood splattered on the cobbles, it was possible she was cut while lying down, and her eyes were wide open upon death, as if disbelieving this cruel trick of fate.

The author of the file could not say with any degree of certainty whether the victim’s name was Mary or Polly. She was an unfortunate, a prostitute, and like other members of the criminal classes had found the need to occasionally change her name for various reasons. If her name was Polly, she might have chosen Mary because it made her sound more virtuous, like the Virgin Mary, or otherwise, like Mary Magdalene. It was a common Irish name, so common as to be practically anonymous. Whitechapel was full of Marys. If her name really was Mary, it was possible she chose Polly because it made her stand out from among the Marys. “Polly” sounded fun-loving and gay. A man seeking female companionship might have chosen her over her companions simply because her name was Polly.

In the photograph affixed to the file, she lay in a box made of what looked to be galvanized tin. One hesitated to call it a coffin. A coffin was made for one person, and it was buried with them. This contained someone else’s remains a half hour before, and probably someone else’s a half hour later. The galvanizing process involved submerging the tin in molten zinc for durability. That box must have held hundreds of bodies. For all I knew, both victims had used the same one. There was no way to differentiate one box from another. There was no shroud, nor any form of lining; merely bare metal. No dignity, no personality, merely anonymity.
How did you end here, Mary?
I wondered.
You were once so full of life and promise.

In fact, she was full of life an hour before her death, witnesses claimed. She’d been sitting in the Frying Pan public house, having a glass of gin, making jokes with her friend, and bemoaning the fact that she didn’t have enough money for a bed for the night. She did have a new bonnet, however, and on the strength of that she was certain to make up the money she needed. Mary was not beautiful, but she was presentable enough. She was in her forties in a profession whose members rarely reached fifty and lived in a district in which the average age of death was around thirty-five, yet she still lived. She was resilient. She knew the cruelty of life, but she was optimistic. She knew the dangers, or at least, she thought she did. She wasn’t prepared for her killer, but then who would be?

A friend, whose statement was in the file, had met up with her later in the evening, sometime around two in the morning. Mary had already served several clients on the strength of that new bonnet, but had just as quickly drunk the money away again. She was drunk and still hadn’t the ready for a bed. She was a confirmed drinker, an “alcoholic,” to use the fancy new professional term. She could not quit. Given the choice, she had chosen a drink over even a place to sleep several times that evening. She lived to drink and had died because of it. Had she spent the few pennies she made on her bed the first time she earned it, she’d have been safely tucked away when the Whitechapel Killer chose his first victim.

I put down the file and picked up another.

Annie Chapman, the second victim, was what is known as a casual prostitute. She made her living as a worker in crochet and by making and selling paper flowers, but in order to pay for the drink to which she had become addicted, she occasionally stepped out with men. She was a sad case. Annie was forty-seven, plump and consumptive, but well liked at her boardinghouse, where she was known as Dark Annie. In fact, one of the men she stepped out with was considering making the arrangement more permanent. The reputation left behind by both victims was that neither of them would be missed, but the truth was that Annie would be missed by many tenants and even by the landlords where she stayed. The sermons that preached that such a wicked life inevitably turns a woman into a shrill harridan were not strictly true.

Annie had found herself in a rare argument a few days before with another local woman which came to blows, leaving her bruised and feeling low. She had considered going to a casual ward on September seventh until she recovered. Three days later she was still feeling ill when the owner of her lodging house came asking for rent. He claimed she was drunk and told her to pay him if she intended to sleep there that night. She went out to make the few pence for her bed the only way she could. Unverified claims put her at the Ten Bells Pub on Church Street early the next morning, probably having spent the rent on drink like Nichols. An hour later, she was found nearby in Hanbury Street between a set of steps and a wooden fence. Her face and hands were covered in blood, and her hands raised as if vainly trying to ward off the relentless steel of the knife that killed her. The tip of her tongue protruded between her teeth and the cut in her throat had sliced the neckerchief she wore in two. When she was taken to the mortuary, the postmortem revealed that her entire womb had been removed and was nowhere to be found. Like Mary Nichols, her sister in death, Annie was placed in a battered tin coffin and photographed, pale from consumption, her tongue still visible between her lips.

As luck would have it, and one must remember in the East End most all luck is bad luck, there was a folded apron found beside the corpse, a leather apron as might be used by a butcher or tanner. If it was a clue, the Whitechapel Killer had been conspicuously forgetful to leave behind so well tended an article of clothing. If not, he either intentionally left it behind or it was already there when he killed her. Why did he not take it with him, while carrying away the portion he had cut from her body?

I knew these streets now, or was getting to know them. Nothing worth so much as a farthing was left on the streets. Even an orange peel tossed to the ground would be picked up by someone else and eaten. These people were on the verge of starvation. A leather apron, even a used one, was worth sixpence or more. There was the cost of a bed and a meal right there.

I flipped out my notebook and wrote the first of what would eventually be hundreds of questions: does the killer bring a candle or some kind of lantern, or does he perform such skillful surgery by touch only, in total darkness?

I looked over at my employer. The file was on the table in front of him and he was sitting back with his legs crossed and his arms clasped about his chest. He looked low, as anyone who had just read what he did should look.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think sometimes I want to buy a croft on an island in the farthest Hebrides and not see a single human being from one year to the next. I have been negligent, lad. The money that sits in my accounts could have been put to use and done some good there.”

“You already contribute to several programs there, sir,” I reminded him. “Besides, no amount of money is going to help women like Mary and Annie. They need the drink. They wouldn’t say thank you for a home and steady employment if it meant they couldn’t have several glasses of gin per day.”

The Guv relaxed his grip on himself. “I suppose you are correct, but I cannot abide it. We are given a paradise on Earth, and yet we make it over into the very picture of hell. I wonder if this killer feels that he is releasing these women to a better life than they have been living. I’ve been guilty, lad, of forgetting. I stand in my garden and tend to my plants, while scarcely a mile away women like this, who should be grandmothers and pillars of their neighborhood, offer themselves in the street to strangers for the price of a bed.”

CHAPTER SIX

That afternoon, while I was busy carrying messages to various departments for the desk sergeant, and a few to various buildings nearby in Whitehall Street, Cyrus Barker stepped out for an hour or two. He didn’t say where he went, but then I had grown used to such behavior. He certainly didn’t need my permission to do what he thought best.

Six o’clock finally arrived according to the booming of Big Ben, and I went downstairs to the room full of lockers and changed into my regular clothing while the Guv spent the time chatting up anyone who would speak to him. He would take in information and opinions piecemeal, making no judgments as yet, merely asking questions. I’d seen him do it a thousand times. He would start with no opinion, consider that of whomever he was speaking to and then squeeze them as if they were a sponge. Later, when he had put together all the various accounts and formed a possible theory, he might come back and question them again, asking still more probing questions. Sometimes he would bark at them, threaten them in order to shake them up. When he was done questioning a witness, he either had all the information they could give or he could estimate their opinion. That being said, he approached them according to his personal instinct, never two people the same way twice. I suppose that is what Scotland Yard meant when they said that his methods were “irregular.” They were not, nor could not be, successfully codified. They were uniquely his.

I met him in the hall by the front entrance. He’s not an expressive man, but I could tell he was pleased with his first day at the Yard. By the creases at the corners of his spectacles, I deduced his eyes were half open with satisfaction.

“A good day?” I asked.

“Well enough for our first.”

I cautioned myself not to ask where he had disappeared to during the afternoon. He would reveal it in what he liked to call “the fullness of time.” That’s the way he actually spoke, a farrago of quaint phrases, Scottish axioms, and things he’d picked up in books. Autodidacts are always unique. Couple that with an early life spent among the Chinese as an orphan, hiding his race in order to survive, and you have not merely unique but remarkable. Travel does not merely broaden the mind, it deepens it as well.

We climbed into a hansom cab and Barker told the cabman to take us to Whitechapel. I suppressed a sigh. Here I was thinking my day was over. Obviously, the Guv wanted to tour the streets a second time. My duty was to see that he stopped to eat something, otherwise he’d be so caught up in his work that he might not stop for hours. I speculated that at some point he would eventually run out of energy, but that would be hours beyond what I could endure.

If I had known we would be walking Whitechapel officially within a few days, I’d have had no reason to sneak out of the house under cover of darkness with Israel to search for the killer. Our vehicle crossed through the Strand, into Fleet Street, through the City, and finally into Whitechapel, a matter of about half an hour during the busiest time of the day. Traffic was very slow around Aldgate, but Barker did not seem inclined to get out and walk. I theorized he must have a particular destination.

“Here we are,” he finally said, leaning forward to get out as we drew to the curb. We were at the corner of Thrawl Street and Brick Lane. It was not a prepossessing address. I stepped down and regarded one building in particular. Certain public houses call attention to themselves by having a door on the diagonal at a corner. This one did, as well as a stone emblem over the lintel, illustrating the name for the illiterate masses.

“The Frying Pan?” I asked.

“It’s not merely a public house, it is also an inn. Rooms are available by the week. I have let it for the month.”

“The month?” I asked. “You mean we’ll be staying here for an entire month?”

“Or until we find the Whitechapel Killer. I want to be here when he kills again. No news is worthwhile that is learned secondhand.”

As stoic as my room in Newington is, I’d grown accustomed to it. My books are there and my clothes, and Mac sees to my every need, if begrudgingly. Etienne Dummolard makes my coffee and my breakfast, and Harm and I tolerate one another. To give all that up to live over a raucous public house for a solid month seemed too great a sacrifice just to capture a murderer. On the other hand, it was no use saying no to Barker. One might as well try saying it to a wall. The results are the same.

“Let’s go in, then,” I said.

The proprietor, when we met him, looked like a partially shaved bear. He must have weighed twenty stone, and had the circumference of a barrel. He gave us a key and we climbed a very narrow staircase to the first floor. It made me wonder how the proprietor squeezed up the stair. I hazarded a guess that the place had been built during George III’s reign, when this street was the very edge of town and green fields were all one saw to the east. No sooner were we in the room than my employer handed me a tin and a spoon.