I said nothing.
“So he finds a cockney waif. And he works on her. And I do mean works. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t just a few voice lessons. He had to tear her down and build her up again new. It was a battle almost to the death: screams, threats, hysterics, sleepless nights, even those chains in that cellar.”
As he spoke, I could see it. Behind Dare’s languor and sarcasm, a crazed zealot could have existed. The sarcasm, the wit, the grace—maybe that was all camouflage for the elemental Thomas Dare.
“Where is this going?”
“After six months of grinding, he reintroduced her to H. ‘In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen,’ over and over again, night after night, until the poor child was in hysterics. He brought her to the miracle of the vowel A. ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.’ Over, over, over yet again. Mad to begin with, he made her half mad, the poor child, with no defenses, no place to run, no inner strength. And yes, he did it. I must say, near-on destroying her, he beat her until she spoke like a true lady of means. Not only that, cleaned up, put in fashionable gowns, she turned out to be, God in heaven, beautiful. He squired her about town for a bit, showing her off, showing off his triumph. Was he using her for immoral purposes? You’re a man. You tell me.”
I let this sit where it was. I had no comment. It disappointed me how right it felt, as ascribed to Thomas Dare.
“I hope you’re not waiting for the happy ending,” said the colonel.
“Please continue.”
“It seems another man was involved.”
“She met someone?”
“Someone was living with Dare. Nobody got a good look at him, but he was gone every day, then up every night late, writing in his attic room. Anyhow, it seems that even as Dare fell in love with his creation—”
“Pygmalion,” I said.
“This isn’t literature, you bloody fool. This is what’s real and dark in the world. This is what bites. The core of the situation is that Dare’s in love with this girl, but in the end the other man cannot stand what Dare’s doing to her. Maybe she reminded him of someone he knew and loved thirty-one years earlier. So one night, the other man gives her a pile of money and urges her to run away, to get away from Dare because she is too much Dare’s toy; he will crush her to nothingness. Dare wants a statue, not a wife. She knew that, she saw that in him. So just before Dare is about to announce his betrothal to Miss Elizabeth Little, she disappears.”
I tried to justify it. If true, it meant merely that Dare was a bastard, but he had tendencies toward being a bastard anyhow, as that is so often the penalty of greatness. “I’m trying to think how this fits in. It speaks to character, not action.”
“Character is action,” said the colonel.
It was here that it finally occurred to the idiot inside my head to ask about the mysterious “roommate” who seemed to be the servomechanism for all the turmoil.
“I say, even for having spent so much time reading, you are thick,” said the colonel. “I was the other fellow.”
I must have gulped or swallowed or blinked, for I could not have encountered this without an appalled reaction. The colonel, however, kept his disinterested duty face square to me, betraying nothing.
“If you”—I struggled—“if he, if . . .” and then I was out of ifs and left with only one. “If he knew you, the profile preceded the murders,” I blurted. “He knew it all, your skills, your career, your spelling deficiency, your strong vision, your courage. He knew of your rings, your memories of a young woman butchered. The murders were informed, shaped, sculpted to fit the profile. Then . . . who committed the murders?”
There could be but one answer.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Jeb’s Memoir
Three days later, I invited Professor Dare to meet me at Dutfield’s Yard, the murder site of Elizabeth Stride. I chose four P.M. It was a brisk December afternoon, though I was impevious to a lot of treacly Christmas nonsense.
The professor seemed chipper enough. He was the jovial ghost of murders past, I supposed, and I made an effort to match his easy glee. He was in tweed, as usual, with a warm slouch hat of wool keeping his magnificent head of blond hair warm. He smoked a jaunty pipe, his cheeks were pink, and he radiated happiness and satisfaction. I don’t believe I’d ever seen him so at peace and content with the world.
“Yes, Jeb. Please tell me what you need. I am at your disposal.”
“Sir,” I said, feeling the chill as we stood next to the wooden slats of the door in the gate that led into the yard where poor Liz had been killed what seemed so long ago, “I was not here that night, so I need some guidance if I’m to put this one together in a story. It’s my weakest account.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “But do recall, I have not been here, either. Perhaps the two of us can work it out.”
With that, we opened the gate and confronted Liz’s falling place, which was now bare and prosaic, a simple joinery of brick wall to the pavement of the yard. Looking inward, we saw not much space, hardly justifying the name “yard,” hardly bigger than Miller’s Court, just an opening between the crazed and unplanned construction that marked the East End where the bricklayers designed the city on the fly. We could see a couple of small shops and, deeper in, a stairway running to the balcony of a small cottage. Nothing at all remarkable.
“I make it here,” I said, pointing to the spot where it seemed certain Liz had been discovered, just beyond the rotational arc of the open right-hand door.
“So it is.”
“Jack has killed but not desecrated. He is caught by an interloper who has just opened the gate. He freezes. The driver of the cart, sensing his pony’s sudden reluctance, jumps off his wagon and strikes a match. He sees the body in the cone of light. He goes racing off to alert colleagues, and Jack slides out in the narrow gap between the pony cart and the gateway.”
“That, I believe, is how the papers had it,” he said. “Do you have another idea?”
“Hmm,” I said. “I’m just astounded how he was not spotted as witnesses and coppers arrived. The driver did not hold on his alert. He returned with three colleagues from the club almost immediately”—I pointed to the two-story building that formed the northern boundry of Dutfield’s Yard beyond the gateway, and its doorway just twenty feet beyond where we stood—“by way of its main entrance, which fronts on Berner. It was quite full, as some sort of anarchistic meeting was taking place, and in under a minute more of those men poured into Berner Street and were very soon swarming thickly on the area. Meanwhile, the coppers were quick to arrive—street constables, that is—plus many people from Berner, and farther up, from the well-traveled Commercial. It was hardly an obscure spot.”
“I cannot answer for what the newspapers say. Perhaps you should discuss this with your friend Harry Dam, when he is not busy constructing an auto-da-fé for the Jews. But what you are describing does not seem to me impossible. Remember, he’s slight, and thus the pony won’t shy at him, thinking him a child and fearing no whip from him. He’s slight enough to squeeze between the cart and the gateway and be gone quickly.”
“I suppose,” I said, “but the pony is already alerted, already skittish, by smell. It seems just as likely that the sudden appearance of a figure from the dark, child-sized or not, would have caused the nervous beast to create a disturbance.”
“Who knows the minds of ponies?” said the professor.
“Fair enough,” I said. “But does it not strike you odd, Professor, that we are hard upon the single building in London that is regularly trafficked by revolutionaries, secret policemen, spies, the whole monkey house of Mittleuropean battle between autocratic governments and the men who would overthrow them. This building would be, would it not, full of intrigue, plot, plan, various stratagems and deceits, to say nothing of talents for escape and evasion?”