Arthur noticed Bram regarding him curiously, and he shook himself from this vision. What a queer thing to imagine!
“I think,” Arthur said at last, “that these girls would have us see to it that their killer was brought to justice. At any cost. Any cost at all.”
Bram stood and began unrolling his sleeves. He fastened the buttons on his cuffs one by one before he spoke again.
“Very well,” said Bram. “Then I am with you.” He took his coat and slid it over his outstretched arms. “Whatever that cost might be.”
December 6, 1900
Arthur and Bram stood on Bridge Street, just across from the Jews’ Burial Ground. Though it was quite dark, they could still make out a few of the tallest headstones, chipped and ragged, illuminated by the lights of the workhouse behind them. They heard the groans of drunks from somewhere beyond, and from the large road they heard the faint pitter-patter of prostitutes’ feet along the dirt. Arthur had not planned this return to the East End, to be sure. But now that he was here, and had been venturing here for the past two days, he realized that of course there was nowhere else for this matter to properly end.
Arthur regarded the Stegler family’s staunch two-story in front of him. He and Bram had found the house easily, by a simple search of the public records regarding the Stegler printing business. Over the last two days, they had kept watch over the property. In a small black notebook, they had kept track of the identities and schedules of each resident of the house. First there was Bobby, who left the house early every morning to attend to his duties at the family press. Bobby’s father, Tobias, left each day a bit later in the morning, stopping in on the press and then on other errands in regard to his business. Bobby’s sister, whose name they learned was Melinda, lived in the house as well and seemed to be at home most of the day, watching after the various servant girls who came by and attending to some of the chores herself. In the evenings she would dine out with friends. These three characters made up the sum of the house’s residents-a search of the death notices revealed that Bobby’s mother had passed many years ago, when he was just a boy.
Arthur had followed Tobias Stegler the day before, and to Arthur’s shock he learned that the man owned a number of houses on Watney Street, near Whitechapel, including the one that had been rented out secretly as a boardinghouse by its caretaker-the one behind which the body of Sally Needling had been found. When he’d seen Mr. Stegler give a few raps on the outside of that house’s door and then saw the lady of the house answer, Arthur had almost lost his wits with surprise. The last time he’d seen this woman, she had been disconsolate, sitting on the narrow staircase of her black-market boardinghouse and crying over the body she’d found and robbed. And here she was calmly opening the door for her landlord, the father of the boy who had done that very murdering. Arthur remembered her fear, he remembered that she’d been keeping the business she ran from this house secret from the landlord-from the man he now knew was Tobias Stegler. Arthur watched as she passed Mr. Stegler a clump of bills and sent him on his way. He never entered the house, as he was seemingly content to have collected his rents and saw no need for further inquiry into the state of his property.
Clearly, this was no coincidence. But it took an hour of talking through the situation with Bram, later that night, before Arthur figured out what it meant. Tobias Stegler did not know about the boardinghouse being run out of his property, they reasoned. If he did, then the woman of the house would have had no cause to respond to Arthur’s threat, all those weeks ago, that he would tell her landlord of her secret. But, they also reasoned, somehow Bobby Stegler did know, and he’d used this to his advantage. He knew that he would need an out-of-theway place, a quiet boardinghouse without a lot of guests, to bring his first victim. When he learned, probably through some simple accident, that one of the women his father rented to was secretly keeping lodgers, it only made sense for him to make use of it. He would not, however, have risked a second trip to the same house, for his second victim. He had gotten lucky enough that the woman hadn’t recognized him once-though as far as Arthur and Bram could tell, she might not even know the boy’s face.
If Arthur had harbored any doubts as to Bobby Stegler’s guilt in the murders, this revelation eliminated them. Bobby had particular means to have committed these crimes, he had the opportunity, and he certainly had a motive, however perverse it might be. What the boy had done was more evil, Arthur knew, than simple murder. He had toyed with his victims first; he had seduced them, he had said he loved them, he had made them feel love, and then he had strangled them in dirtflecked bathtubs. He had not simply slaughtered these women; he had first violated their womanhood. He had cruelly struck each woman at the core of her female being. It was worse than murdering a man. And it was worse even than simply murdering a woman. He had struck at the entire womanly sex.
Arthur and Bram waited until the house was empty. At 8:30 p.m., as expected, Bobby’s sister, Melinda, left the house for an evening rendezvous with her girlfriends. Bobby had not yet returned from the printing house; the past two nights, he had not returned until after ten. Tobias was out at this hour as well, dining with another neighborhood landlord. The house was dark, and perfectly still. This was as planned. As Arthur and Bram watched Melinda Stegler turn the corner on to Harford Street, they each finished a final cigarette of the evening and stepped across Bridge Street, toward the house.
They had discussed their plan at length, and so as the men stepped around the house, to the back, neither needed to speak a word. The back door was cheap and thin, probably held shut with only a small lock, but they went for the window next to it. As Arthur raised his booted foot and kicked straight through it, the glass broke easily. Amid the squalid noise of the East End, the sound of shattering glass blended into the din. One more violent crash hardly added to the neighborhood’s clamor.
Arthur stepped through the window, and Bram followed close behind. Their boots crunched the glass underfoot as they walked through the kitchen. Their earliest reconnaissance had told them that Bobby’s bedroom was on the second floor, and they wasted no time in heading straight for it. They knew what they were here for. They had abandoned all caution to get it.
The staircase creaked with the weight of two bodies on it. The house was of poor construction, and the wooden boards felt as if they might snap at any moment. Arthur’s boots left a trail of tiny glass shards as he walked, a line of glinting sparkles from the kitchen to the second-floor bedroom and into the mouth of hell itself.
When both men had entered Bobby Stegler’s quarters, they shut the door and lit the single gas lamp upon the wall. A narrow four-poster bed rested, unmade, in one corner of the room. Two broad chairs sat across from it, as if ready to entertain guests. But, judging from the messy piles of clothes which covered them, Arthur found it unlikely that many guests came up here. The sloppiness of the boy’s room pointed to a loneliness within him-as if he could allow his private quarters to be in disarray because he would never, at any point, need to share them. Did this raging child have friends? Did he have cricket with the other boys his age? Had he ever felt love? Had he ever looked into the face of a woman and known that tender feeling, that warmth which spread from belly to beard? Had his hands ever quivered as they touched a young girl’s glove? Had he ever bit his lip to keep from crying out with joy as he bent over to kiss a woman’s hand?