Ernie Sleaford was more deferential to her now. When he heard about the new book, and the size of her advance, he realized that she was a player, and he had begun to treat her with a new deference.
He had even offered her a rise in case she was thinking of quitting.
But she wasn’t going to quit. She quite enjoyed her work. Besides, it was so amusing now to see him stand up for her when she came into his grubby little office.
“We’ll need a picture for the front page, love,” he said in his most civil tones. “Would you mind if Denny took your picture, or is there one you’d rather use?”
Jackie shrugged. “Let him take one. I just had my hair done. So I make the front page as well?”
“Oh yes. We’re devoting the whole page to Erma Bradley’s suicide, and we want a sidebar of your piece. “I Was the Last to See the Monster Alive.” It will make a nice contrast. Your picture beside pudding-faced Erma.”
“I thought she looked all right for forty-seven. Didn’t the picture I got turn out all right?”
Ernie looked shocked. “We’re not using that one, Jackie. We want to remember her the way she was. A vicious ugly beastie in contrast to a pure young thing like yourself. Sort of a moral statement, like.”
Jack Be Quick
BARBARA PAUL
Barbara Paul (b. 1931) was born in Maysville, Kentucky, and educated at Bowling Green State University, University of Redlands, and the University of Pittsburgh, where she received her Ph.D. in Theater in 1969. Before becoming a full-time novelist, she worked as a college professor and drama director. Her first novel, An Exercise for Madmen (1978) was science fiction, but beginning with The Fourth Wall (1979), she would devote most of her energies to mysteries, often with a theatrical background. Among her works are a series of opera-related historical mysteries in which Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar figure as amateur sleuths (Farrar is the smart one, Caruso the Watson), beginning with A Cadenza for Caruso (1984), and a contemporary police procedural series about homicide detective Marian Larch, beginning with The Renewable Virgin (1984).
Paul’s work in the field shows an unusual variety and versatility, reflected in her gift for striking titles like Liars and Tyrants and People Who Turn Blue (1980), Your Eyelids Are Growing Heavy (1981), He Huffed and He Puffed (1989), Good King Sauerkraut (1990), and Inlaws and Outlaws (1990). The whimsically titled But He Was Already Dead When I Got There (1986) suggests her pleasure in playing with genre conventions.
In “Jack Be Quick,” Paul suggests a solution to one of the most notorious unsolved cases in criminal history. Jack the Ripper, killer of prostitutes in 1880s London, operated in a time and place, sadly unlike here and now, where serial killers were rare. Non-fictional accounts of the case could fill a library, and fictional treatments, direct and indirect, go back at least as far as Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger (1913). Paul’s approach to the mystery, in the 1991 anthology Solved, is among the most original, as well as being notable for a highly appropriate feminist slant.
30 September 1888, St. Jude’s Vicarage, Whitechapel.
He took two, this time, and within the same hour, Inspector Abberline told us. The first victim was found this morning less than an hour after midnight, in a small court off Berner Street.
The second woman was killed in Mitre Square forty-five minutes later. He did his hideous deed and escaped undetected, as he always does. Inspector Abberline believes he was interrupted in Berner Street, because he did not…do to that woman what he’d done to his other victims. My husband threw the Inspector a warning look, not wanting me exposed to such distressing matters more than necessary.
“But the second woman was severely mutilated,” Inspector Abberline concluded, offering no details. “He finished in Mitre Square what he’d begun in Berner Street.”
My husband and I knew nothing of the double murder, not having left the vicarage all day. When no one appeared for morning services, Edward was angry. Customarily we can count on a Sunday congregation of a dozen or so; we should have suspected something was amiss. “Do you know who the women were, Inspector?” I asked.
“One of them,” he said. “His Mitre Square victim was named Catherine Eddowes. We have yet to establish the identity of the Berner Street victim.”
Inspector Abberline looked exhausted; I poured him another cup of tea. He undoubtedly would have preferred something stronger, but Edward permitted no spirits in the house, not even sherry. I waited until the Inspector had taken a sip before I put my next question to him. “Did he cut out Catherine Eddowes’s womb the way he did Annie Chapman’s?”
Edward looked shocked that I should know about that, but the police investigator was beyond shock. “Yes, Mrs. Wickham, he did.
But this time he did not take it away with him.”
It was one of the many concerns that baffled and horrified me about the series of grisly murders haunting London. Annie Chapman’s disemboweled body had been found in Hanbury Street three weeks earlier; all the entrails had been piled above her shoulder except the womb. Why had he stolen her womb? “And the intestines?”
“Heaped over the left shoulder, as before.”
Edward cleared his throat. “This Eddowes woman…she was a prostitute!”
Inspector Abberline said she was. “And I have no doubt that the Berner Street victim will prove to have been on the game as well.
That’s the only common ground among his victims — they were all prostitutes.”
“Evil combating evil,” Edward said with a shake of his head.
“When will it end?”
Inspector Abberline put down his cup. “The end, alas, is not yet in sight. We are still conducting door-to-door searches, and the populace is beginning to panic. We have our hands full dispersing the mobs.”
“Mobs?” Edward asked. “Has there been trouble?”
“I regret to say there has. Everyone is so desperate to find someone to blame…” The Inspector allowed the unfinished sentence to linger a moment. “Earlier today a constable was chasing a petty thief through the streets, and someone who saw them called out, ‘It’s the Ripper!’ Several men joined in the chase, and then others, as the word spread that it was the Ripper the constable was pursuing. That mob was thirsting for blood — nothing less than a lynching would have satisfied them. The thief and the constable ended up barricading themselves in a building together until help could arrive.”
Edward shook his head sadly. “The world has gone mad.”
“It’s why I have come to you, Vicar,” Inspector Abberline said.
“You can help calm them down. You could speak to them, persuade them to compose themselves. Your presence in the streets will offer a measure of reassurance.”
“Of course,” Edward said quickly. “Shall we leave now? I’ll get my coat.”
The Inspector turned to me. “Mrs. Wickham, thank you for the tea. Now we must be going.” I saw both men to the door.
The Inspector did not know he had interrupted a disagreement between my husband and me, one that was recurring with increasing frequency of late. But I had no wish to revive the dispute when Edward returned; the shadow of these two new murders lay like a shroud over all other concerns. I retired to my sewing closet, where I tried to calm my spirit through prayer. One could not think dispassionately of this unknown man wandering the streets of London’s East End, a man who hated women so profoundly that he cut away those parts of the bodies that proclaimed his victims to be female. I tried to pray for him, lost soul that he is; God forgive me, I could not.