‘And the spark that could ignite it?’ asked Joe, already knowing the answer.
‘A fuse. A trail of murdered memsahibs. Already it is spoken of. One thing is lacking, sahib. The match. And that you hold in your own hand.’
‘Joe Sandilands holds it?’ Nancy said sharply. ‘What do you mean, Naurung?’
‘He means,’ said Joe, ‘that when the great detective from Scotland Yard finishes his investigations and declares to the Governor of Bengal that five English ladies, wives of officers in a smart cavalry regiment, have each been murdered with much malice aforethought by Indians or even a single Indian, there will be reprisals. There will be token arrests, there may even be executions. And with a dedicated and implacable Colonel like Prentice in command of the regiment, who knows how far it will go? We all know what his reputation is for exacting revenge.’
‘And then there will be retaliation and overreaction from native groups,’ said Nancy, white-faced. ‘The Congress wallahs could seize on this and use it! Just what they need as a battle flag to wave in our faces! Oh, Joe…’
Naurung, who had stood in almost total silence throughout the exchange, now spoke quietly.
‘Sandilands Sahib says when he makes his revelation. May we know if it is indeed his decision to incriminate Indians in the deaths?’
Joe looked at the three strained faces around him and shook his head, smiling bleakly. ‘You must think that so far I have done very little to justify my professional status and the confidence the Governor has shown in me. You may well even be recalling the title the press frequently gives us at Scotland Yard – the Defective Force. It is difficult to take over cases years old, badly managed from the outset, cases in which I cannot use any of the new forensic methods I have been so proudly demonstrating to the Bengal Police for the last six months.’
Naurung nodded in understanding.
‘No fingerprinting, no blood-typing, no door-to-door enquiries, no string of informants. I’ve been forced back on to a dependence on reason and common sense… but something more.’
He paused for a moment, wondering how receptive his audience would be to what he had to say next, and then plunged on.
‘I was billeted in the war with a very clever man – a well-read man. He’d brought two books to the war with him – the works of an Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud, and a Swiss called Carl Jung. I had snatched up the works of Shakespeare and Kim. When war isn’t being instant noisy death whizzing past your ears it’s being a boring longueur and my companion and I whiled away the waiting between pushes by reading each other’s books. I don’t know which of us had the better bargain! I learned much about the science of psychology of the unconscious mind, about psychoanalysis and the development of character. My friend didn’t believe in the existence of evil and he laughed at the policeman’s idea of the “criminal type”. He believed that a man’s character was set for life – moulded if you like – by circumstances in the first seven or so years of his existence. If he is born into poverty and crime, he is likely to grow up poor and a criminal, through no fault of his own.’
The Naurungs looked at him alertly and nodded. Naurung senior said, ‘We have a saying in Bengal – “The Rajah’s son does not exchange shoes with the cobbler’s son.” ’
‘Just so,’ said Joe a little deflated. ‘I have also made a study of a phenomenon in the history of crime in Europe and America which began with the slaying of five ladies of the night – five prostitutes – in the East End of London fifty years ago.’
Naurung senior listened with heightened attention and his son nodded eagerly. It was clear they were both aware of the case.
‘Jack the Ripper?’ said Nancy. ‘Are you talking about the Whitechapel murders? The police never solved those crimes, did they?’
‘No,’ said Joe. ‘But, with the help of my friend in the trenches, I do believe I have worked out Jack’s identity. The motive, I think, is very different in the sequence of murders we’re investigating but there are aspects in common. We’re not looking here at a frenzied attack carried out through an overriding sexual motive but at a carefully executed pattern of killings. The victims have been selected. They didn’t just happen to stray into range of the killer when he was experiencing a maniacal urge to destroy. Their habits were well known to him. He could follow them, even into their bathroom in the case of Peggy Somersham, murder them and instantly disappear. Like Jack, he could disappear with ease because he was at home.
‘When I was doing some research into the Ripper murders a couple of years ago I came on a paper – or letter rather – addressed to the head of the CID in 1888 by a Dr Thomas Bond who was much concerned with the Ripper investigation. I was fascinated. What I had in my hands was a portrait of the murderer in words. The good doctor, as if by some magic it seemed at first reading, was sketching an outline of the man – his height, his weight, his disposition, his job, the place where he was to be found and the make-up of his family. Had I been on the strength in 1888 I could, on reading that letter, have walked down the Whitechapel Road and felt his collar! On second reading I was impressed for quite a different reason. The doctor was using nothing but sound common sense and inspired reasoning, drawing on information from the scenes of crime. And I could do the same.’
‘You’re about to tell us that you’ve solved our problem?’ Nancy asked.
Joe grimaced. ‘Your problem, I’m afraid, is a lot more complex than the Ripper case! There we had the same modus operandi – the same knife was used, the killings were done in the same framework of time and place and the motive was blatantly obvious. The killer experienced an ungovernable and psychotic rage against women – women of a certain type, that is.’
‘You mean he was trying to clean up the streets? Get rid of the prostitutes?’ said Nancy.
‘No. I’m certain there was no element of crusade in what he did. I think it was an outburst of sexually inspired fury against a class of women he had good cause to hate. I believe he had personal reasons, springing from his own early days perhaps, for hacking to death and obliterating these women. He was possibly the son of a prostitute, reared by a prostitute – certainly the man was a client of and probably actually knew the women he murdered. It’s my theory that he actually lived with one of them.’
‘But none of the ladies in this case was molested, sahib, and all were killed by different methods,’ said Naurung.
‘And that is what makes it almost impossible to explain,’ said Joe. ‘Let’s look for a moment at motivation. We have already ruled out the two most common ones – lust and financial gain. Not even the ladies’ husbands gained in the slightest by their deaths. So we are left with four: jealousy, elimination, revenge and conviction.’
‘Well, we can rule out jealousy, I think,’ said Nancy. ‘None of the wives had given cause for suspicion… At least I’m not quite certain about Dolly Prentice… There are stories that she was, well, a bit of a flirt… But about the rest there was no gossip at all. You’d say that all the men loved their wives and were quite devastated when they died. None has remarried and I think that’s very significant, don’t you?’
‘Yes, and that in a sense rules out the next motive of elimination. You know – “I will kill off my wife because I want to marry someone else or because she is in possession of a hideous secret concerning me.” Dr Crippen, for example, needed to eliminate his wife in order to marry his lover. But, no, the facts don’t support this explanation in any of the cases. None of our husbands would appear to have profited and flourished as a result.’