At last the party seemed to be breaking up, and by my pocket watch, I knew it was time to say thanks to Charlie and depart from this leafy street in Bloomsbury. I assumed finding a hansom wouldn’t be much of a problem. But a crowd had backed up around Charlie at the doorway, so I backed off and, seeking relief from the closeness of the room, stepped out on the terrace. Ah, the sweetness of the clean air, the drift of some sweet flower’s perfume, the clear night above. I drew it all in, enjoying, and then who should I find hunched against the balustrade but Professor Dare, enjoying a cheroot.
“Oh, hullo,” I said. “I enjoyed your company. You see the world much as I do myself.”
“I hope not. I detest it and everything in it. I once believed in everything, now I believe in nothing. You’re much too young for such cynicism. You have bruising and scarring left to do. You must earn the purity of your contempt, else it’s a pose meant to attract attention.”
“Well, you hide your disillusion brilliantly by the boldness of your wit.”
“Could always crack a line, I’ll say that for myself. But we do have something in common, I might add, now that I think of it.”
“And that would be?”
“Why, Jeb, we both detest Sir Charles Warren and understand that he is entirely too stupid in his thinking to catch this fellow you chaps call the Whitechapel Murderer.”
It was quite a moment. Not a word had been said about the murders the whole night, and I had presumed no one there had any idea I wrote under Jeb for the Star and had seen the wrecked and bleeding bodies steaming and leaking in the cool night air.
“I say,” I said, which is what people say when they have nothing to say, “I say, you have the advantage over me. I know not—”
“Oh, come now. I’ve particularly enjoyed the pieces on Warren’s folly. Your analysis of the broken system that underlies his Scotland Yard is spot-on, but even if they become more efficient and get more boots to the street faster, I don’t think the killer will fall to dragnet. If he were that careless, his luck would have run out, given his need to commit his deeds in heavily patrolled areas, just missing the blue bottles by a hair each time out.”
“Professor Dare, I shan’t lie, because I am indeed professionally Jeb, but how on earth, sir, did you know? Did some kind of spy—”
“No, no. Language. Phonetics. One of my many theories is that we speak two Englishes, a shallow English and a deep English. The second is the language of structure, organization; I call it the Beneath. It lurks, prehistoric and brutal, under the gibbets of grammar, words, punctuation, and neatness in penmanship. It is a reflection of the manner in which we solve problems, it expresses how we think, it expresses our true self. It is, in the end, our truth. I believe I’ve trained myself to read for the tracks of this Beneath, and when I read Jeb in the Star over the past few weeks, I saw those tracks. The music was extremely familiar. Some of the words, too, some of the effects—though now you’re drawn through the sieve of newspaper editing, with some dilution occurring. But I recognized it. You have much to write, much to learn, but if you give it your life, you might at one time accomplish something of note.”
“I’ve actually written five novels. Unpublished, the lot.”
“Write five more.”
“Perhaps I shall. But may I ask, to return to first causes, why you despise Warren at my level of intensity? It seems to be my job, and that explains my occasional interceptions of his vector, but you, sir, a professor at university, I cannot—”
“The murderer. The fiend, of course.”
“The murderer?”
“I adore him. He is so real, he is so fascinating, I cannot get enough. And unlike anything in years, he provokes me. That is why I pore over the accounts; that is why, when time has cooled off the curious mobs, I visit each murder site and look hither and yon for whatever the coppers may have missed. Haven’t found a thing yet. And the most demanding question of alclass="underline" Where is he? Do you have theories?”
“I don’t believe, no matter what the Star publishes, that he’s a Jew. What little I know of Jews convinces me they are not of killing ilk. No, he’s one of us, and his contempt for the poor degraded Judys is really a critique on our system. But perhaps I impose my politics. Sir, do you have theories?”
“In formation. Unsuited for expression at this time.”
“I would love to hear them.”
“Perhaps, then, when they jell into aspic, I shall invite you to the club for a chat. Does that suit?”
“Fabulously,” I said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Diary
September 25, 1888
I had planned very carefully this time, and reconnoitered skillfully, examining against the triple indices of privacy, escape possibilities, and constable patrols. I had found a perfect spot, for this one had to be perfect, and for it to be perfect I had to have privacy with the body for more than a few minutes. I had this night an important agenda. Too bad a poor missy would have to pay for my higher purpose, but then that is the way of our wicked world, is it not?
This time I marked the area south of Whitechapel Road as my hunting ground, while my two previous expeditions had been well north of it. Where Commercial crossed it, then bent toward the east—Whitechapel’s layout is a mess, by the way, having been invented a thousand years ago by wandering cows, chiefly—it pursued an admirable straight course for quite a ways, and the fourth intersection it afforded was with the nondescript Berner Street. This byway yielded a low no-man’s-land of grimy brick and chimney, and being close to Commercial, where the Judys still were ample, it offered darkness for many a secluded rut. I reasoned it would be easy enough to engineer a tête-à-tête with one, and she would turn off Commercial and lead me down Berner. That such a spot was but a few blocks from the police station did not particularly perturb me, for in my observation, the constables did not favor Berner with their attentions.
Perhaps they had been warned off by Sir Charles, because halfway down the first block was a queer institution known as the Anarchists’ Club, where I’d once heard William Morris hold forth on a new aesthetic for modern times to an indifferent audience. He preferred wallpaper to revolution, not a popular position in those precincts. It was full nearly every night with radicals of various Slavic, Jewish, and Russian origins, singing and chanting and conspiring the night away. The coppers would fancy that so much energy would keep any mad killer away, when the exact opposite was true. I knew that such men as were drawn to the club were of a species known as zealots, which would mean that though their eyes were open, what they were really seeing would be dreams of a society where they, and not the pale, lily-livered millionaires of the Kensington Club set, were the masters. The anarchists would hang anybody who belonged to a club, and it was the image of those well-shod feet dangling eight inches above the ground that occupied their imaginations. Then, of course, they would found their own clubs. Such it is with all grand dreamers, of this ilk or that.
I spent this evening rooting around the club. Since radicals believe (happily) that property is crime, they find the notion of locked doors abhorrent. Anyone radical or pretending to be radical may enter and wander the club, which sits next to one of those improvised spaces in chockablock Whitechapel called Dutfield’s Yard. It’s not a yard and there’s no Dutfield anywhere, save painted long ago on the gate. I observed that Judy would frequently open a door in the closed gate for a quick stand-up assignation in the darkness and quietude of the yard, then leave, always pulling the door shut behind her. Thus for my purposes, it was perfect.