I needed a trophy, something that would get them talking, as they had after Annie Chapman’s sweetbreads turned up missing. (Deposited, if you must know, in the River Thames, never to be heard from again.) I reached in and, owing to my study of Dr. Gray’s epic work, took hold of something, then, securing it with one hand, cut it free with the other. I pulled it out, whatever it was—spleen, kidney, maybe displaced heart, uterus, some other womb part, whatever—and slid it into a pocket. And then I looked up, and across the square, holding a lantern, was a copper.
I froze instantly, though I doubted his eyes could have penetrated the darkness that cloaked me. He stood at the head of what looked to be a sort of passageway between buildings of whose existence I’d had no suspicion. His circle of light seemed to capture with great precision the texture of the brickwork that was his backdrop. It was a moment of high dread. If he advanced, in a very few feet the limit of his lantern’s illumination would reveal me, red of hand, crouched over opened body, viscera everywhere like the remains of a gaudy party. Then he would instantly go to whistle, his shrill blasts filling the night air and bringing aid from all quarters. More distressingly, he was too far away for me to bring down fast, as I had planned to do with the man on the pony cart. Plus, in physical affray, he would indubitably prove a wilier opponent than a man who drives a pony cart for a living. He would know tricks, blows, holds, be well versed in pugilism and knockabout play. He would net me sure. Thus did the angel of death’s wings flap o’er me, so vividly I felt the noose tightening and sensed the crowd’s ardor as I stood on the trembly platform of the Newgate Gaol gallows.
It seemed like an eternity. He stood there, peering about, but did not take one step closer. The odor of my lovely’s shit must not have reached him yet, nor the penny-bitter smell of her blood.
He turned, he retreated, and soon even his light was not in evidence as he departed by that narrow passageway.
I felt the rush of air from my lungs, as I had just had another escape so near it was disorienting. Disaster that close, so close you can hear the whisper of the ax, is an unsettling thing.
And perhaps that is why my next reaction, unbidden, unexpected, was rage. It was as if I had my guts clenched in a giant fist, and when whoever held it tight let me go, what rushed in was anger, the urge to hurt, to smash, to kill that which had been killed. Someone in science should make a study of what secret fluids race to a man’s brain in extreme moments. Whatever they were, they did not leave me calm and collected, capable of wit or irony. Instead they turned me—perhaps this would surprise a reader if ever, by chance, this volume should come to light—insane. Insaner, this theoretical reader might say, but I reply, No, no, I was perfectly sane through it all, except this one moment. Forgive me, unknown unfortunate, it was not you upon whom I was spending my wrath, but it—the universe, the empire, the system, the nearness of my own destruction, the whimsies of fate and chance, in short, all those permanent entities that no man may affect—upon which I felt the need to rain destruction. Alas, your freshly murdered body was the only vessel available.
I destroyed that which had been heretofore sacrosanct. I took the dear lady’s face from her. It took but a minute, a sharp knife being an instrument of great utility when properly applied. I had been until then a cutter, but now I sank another grade deeper into human depravity and became a stabber. I stabbed her face, feeling the blade puncture and slide off the hard mass of skull below, then slide through the flesh, ripping and tearing and removing immense pie-shaped units of skin with each drive. I could not stop myself and was almost sobbing in hysteria. I cut her eyes, even, driving the blade through the lidded orbs, feeling what lay beneath go all slippery and slidey, like grapes in a bed of mechanic’s grease.
And I chopped, another new thing. I chopped strong against her nose, cutting through the cartilage that gives that organ shape, and before I could stop myself, I slightly rotated the blade, yanked hard, and the whole damned thing came off. I went for her ear, sawing like a laborer, and was not rewarded with so smooth a response as from the helpful nose. The ear fought me hard, and I never got it off cleanly, leaving it hanging on a gristly ribbon of cartilage.
I brought my focus down and, in childish tantrum, began to stab at various massifs left in her innards, a kind of mechanical up-down of arm, fist, and knife point, and I could feel the thing bucking into various and sundry structures left aboard. Then my rage exited the excavation proper and moved to skin unopened and unflayed on abdomen and pubis; I stabbed, I stabbed, I stabbed, again feeling point overcome the tensile elasticity of the skin and give way to the subcutaneous tissue beneath, and I further felt that human aspic split and sunder to my enraged energies. Suddenly, I was spent.
I looked at what I had wrought. The face was ruined, a seething mass of dappled black in the lightlessness of the square. It required color to express its truest, purest horror, but it would be the coppers who got the benefit of that display, not me. I would not let myself view the body. I was not squeamish. How could a squeamish man author such an atrocity? I suppose I was still in shock and suddenly, as well, became aware of the passage of time, and knew I had other appointments to keep. I rose, secured the blade in my belt, peeled off my sodden gloves and pocketed them, made sure the apron—so important—was still in my frock coat pocket and Judy’s sweetbreads in the other, rose, and pivoted without a sound.
I crossed the square, clinging to shadow. I didn’t want to leave the same way I had entered, by the opening to Mitre Street, because that copper might have circled on his beat and been headed down Mitre Street even now, and I’d hate to run into him as I exited the square. I turned in to the blackness where I’d seen him, finding it a narrow brick lane between two buildings, and rushed down it. I heard the harsh, overpropelled pitch of the police whistle and realized that constable or another had just discovered the body. Another close-run thing! I continued unabated until the passage delivered me to a dark street leading on the right to Aldgate, on the left to more darkness. This had to be Duke, from which I had seen my thrush emerging a few minutes ago. I took the darker option and came shortly thereupon—insane!—another Duke Street. I was therefore at the corner of Duke and Duke, and despite the bloody business of the evening, I could not suppress a grin at the absurdity of such a thing and the centuries of confusion it must have engendered. Soon I was beyond Houndsditch and moving at a comfortable pace toward the next duty of the evening. As for what was going on in that little chunk of London I had left behind, I neither knew nor cared.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jeb’s Memoir
It was all different. For one thing, the Peelers weren’t the embittered lackeys in a class war between constables and detectives, and for another, there was no looming figure of mad authority like Sir Charles Warren to impress fear and confusion and other idiocies of his ill-trained, overused crew.
All this is ascribable to the higher level of proficiency of the City of London Police over their much more intellectually impoverished brethren of the Met’s H Division. They ran a far cleaner crime scene: no crazed wandering this way or that in rogue hope of encountering something even they would recognize as a “clue,” such as a note saying, “I am the murderer and I reside at 15 Cutthroat Terrace, W3.” Whichever executive was calling the directives gave each man a zone that was his and his alone, and the man crawled it, touching, feeling, looking. They brought in, first thing, a large supply of bull’s-eye lamps, as all the constables carried, and dim as they were, lighting and placing them about brightened the scene considerably. The Met’s rozzers never would had thought of such a thing. Most astonishing of all was how they treated we Johnnies of the press.