[Oscar Wilde 07] - Jack the Ripper: Case Closed

by Gyles Brandreth

  Macnaghten’s thinking was simple: Druitt was a medical man with a lunatic mother. He could wield a scalpel and had lunacy in his blood. Shortly after the Miller’s Court murder Druitt took his own life and the Whitechapel murders ceased. Ergo Druitt is Jack the Ripper!

  Druitt, of course, was not a doctor and while he was certainly fearful that his mind was giving way as his mother’s had done, he could not have murdered Mary Jane Kelly in Whitechapel on 8 November because he was in Bournemouth staying with his sister at the time! She told me so yesterday afternoon – and can furnish witnesses to the fact should they be required.

  As he had promised, George R. Sims supplied me with Miss Druitt’s address. She had earlier declined Sims’ invitation to provide an interview for publication, but she was ready to meet me – indeed, she was eager to do so. I sent her a telegram on Monday and she travelled up to town on Tuesday. I gave her tea at the Savoy. She is a timid soul – a typical English spinster: unpretty, unpowdered, approaching forty – but with a great appetite for scones! She had refused to meet Sims – and had said very little to the police when Sergeant Thick went to question her four years ago – but she was happy to meet me because her brother had given her my book of fairy stories shortly before his death and ‘The Happy Prince’ is ‘the saddest and most beautiful thing’ she has ever read! Her brother, it seems, often spoke of me – recollecting my notoriety at Oxford! – and she was anxious to unburden herself to me because she sensed I would be ‘in sympathy’ with her brother and his tragedy.

  In a nutshell, Druitt was a barrister but not a sufficiently successful one. To supplement his income, he took to tutoring at a boys’ school near his digs in Blackheath. He taught Latin and Greek and coached the Cricket XI. (At Winchester and New College he’d been a cricketer of distinction.) Unfortunately, at Blackheath Druitt developed a tendresse for the captain of the school cricket team – a youth by the name of Dickinson. Even more unfortunately, the tendresse was reciprocated and an affaire ensued. Druitt was thirty-one, the boy was seventeen. Druitt knew that it was wrong – knew that it was madness – but could not stop himself. He confessed all this to his sister, his ‘only friend in the world’ – his mother being confined in the asylum, his father having died a year or two before and his elder brother not being the sort of chap to whom one makes this kind of confession. Miss Druitt did not sit in judgement on her brother’s behaviour – ‘the heart has its reasons’, she said, fluttering her eyelashes – but she urged him ‘to take control of himself’ and to resign from his post at the school and remove himself from harm’s way at the earliest opportunity.

  Druitt promised he would do so and arranged an appointment with the school’s headmaster for Friday 30 November. What occurred at that meeting his sister does not know – but such was her brother’s emotional state at the time, she fears he may have ‘told his whole story’. When his body was found he had a cheque in his wallet for £50. Miss Druitt believes the school may have paid him off to ensure his silence.

  The school did not want a scandal. And Druitt’s family did not want a scandal either. What Miss Druitt told me she had also told her other brother – William Druitt, a solicitor – but he would not believe it (‘Monty was a sportsman and gentleman’, etc.,) and told her to say nothing ‘for the honour of the family’. He preferred the false truth that Montague Druitt was Jack the Ripper to the worse truth that he was a lover of young men!

  Miss Druitt keeps a diary and it accompanies her everywhere – she said, rather amusingly, ‘one must always have something sensational to read in the train’ – and showed me her diary entries for the dates in August and September when the first four of the Whitechapel killings occurred. Montague Druitt was playing cricket in Wimborne on each of the dates in question and stayed with his sister in Wimborne overnight. On the night of the Miller’s Court murder, 8/9 November, Druitt was again with his sister in Bournemouth and that evening two of her friends joined them for a game of Russian Whist. She volunteered the names and addresses of these ladies – ‘both highly respectable’ – should they be required.

  So, Arthur, the upshot is: we can forget Montague John Druitt altogether.

  Ditto John Pizer, better known as ‘Leather Apron’.

  Having concluded my interview with Miss Druitt and taken her by hansom to Waterloo to catch her train home, I instructed the cab to take me on to Whitechapel where (so I was advised by Sims) I would find Pizer at the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor. This is where he holds court as the man who was once ‘thought to be Jack the Ripper but turned out not to be’! I found him without difficulty: he is well known among the regulars. He was tucking in to a supper of bread and kosher sardines, but did not appear to resent my intrusion and he assured me he would tell me ‘anything I wanted to know’ in return for a shilling. I gave him half-a-crown and he proceeded to give me his ‘turn’. It was Henry Irving as Shylock done for the halls. He is an ugly-looking brute: small, thickset, with greasy hair and a weasel’s eyes – not easy to understand (he has a thick guttural accent) and impossible to trust. He’s what your man Dr Watson would call ‘a slippery customer’. Indeed, Pizer was a slipper-maker by trade and, when he worked, carried a knife and wore a leather apron as he went about his business – hence his sobriquet. He had had, he acknowledged, a reputation for taunting the Whitechapel prostitutes – they claimed he was an extortionist and threatened violence against them for money: he denies it – and, when the murders started, word spread like wildfire that it was Leather Apron ‘what done it’. In fact, he had sound alibis for each and every murder and, though questioned by the police, was never at risk of being charged. But for a brief moment he was the most notorious villain in the land – the Star claimed that ‘Leather Apron’ had been named as the murderer by at least fifty of the women who worked on the streets of Whitechapel. The sobriquet made him famous – until another, stronger, more sensational sobriquet came along. Pizer concluded his tale, almost wistfully: ‘When the letters from “Jack the Ripper” appeared in the papers they lost interest in “Leather Apron”.’

  When I asked him who he thought the real murderer might be, he told me he had no idea. ‘Nobody knows. Nobody will ever know. It’s just Jack the Ripper.’

  That is all my news, my friend. I could not write more briefly. I did not have the time.

  Ever yours,

  Oscar

  PS Unless I hear to the contrary, I will assume that my proposed guest list for Saturday night meets with your approval and I will issue invitations accordingly. It is important that Bunbury is with us on Saturday. I believe his life depends on it.

  34

  Murder

  Idid not reply to Oscar’s letter. Instead, I wrote once more to my Touie in Switzerland, telling her how pleased I was to be back home, assuring her that Mrs Stocks was taking good care of me, and reporting to her on the excellent progress I felt I was making with my new story – one inspired by my adventures with the whalers in the Arctic Circle.

  On Friday morning, a little before noon, the telegraph boy arrived with a wire from Oscar:

  GUESTS INVITED + YOUR ROOM AT LANGHAM BOOKED

  + SUPPER AT ELEVEN + REVELATIONS AT MIDNIGHT

  + OSCAR

  On Saturday morning I was still undecided. I felt my comradeship with Oscar required me to attend the supper party he was holding and I was intrigued to know what ‘revelations’ he might conjure up for the benefit of his guests, but at the same time the prospect of seeing Olga once more unnerved me. I had fallen in love with the girl – I couldn’t deny it, at least not to myself – but there could be no future for us. I knew that. What could be gained by seeing her once more but a renewal of desire followed by regret and heartache?

  It was early in the afternoon, at the very moment that I had resolved not to go to London that evening and was beginning to word a telegram of explanation that I might send to Oscar – could I claim to have caught a sudden chill? Or should I tell the simple truth? – when, from my study win
dow, I saw the telegraph boy rest his bicycle against the front gate and come running up the path. It was another wire from Oscar:

  FURTHER MURDER IN TITE STREET + HORROR UNSPEAKABLE + COME SOONEST + OW

  By train and hansom cab, I reached Tite Street in little more than two hours. Darkness had fallen and the street lamps gave a poor light, but I could see through the gloom that the entrance to the road was blocked, as it has been twelve days before when the first body had been found in the alley leading from Tite Street to Paradise Walk. A yellow fog swirled down the street and from it – as I paid off the cabman – I saw a shadowy figure emerge and vanish and appear again, like a ghost on the ramparts at Elsinore.

  I felt I recognised the silhouette. I called out: ‘Is that you, Macnaghten?’

  The figure came towards me. So thick was the murk that I did not see his face until he was a yard away. It was one of Macnaghten’s men – a sergeant. I knew him from my visit to the police morgue the week before. ‘The chief constable’s not here, sir,’ he said.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Another murder.’

  ‘Another woman?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Like the last two, but worse. It’s Jack the Ripper all over again.’

  ‘Can I see the scene?’

  ‘Not without the chief’s say-so, sir. They’ve taken the body away – what was left of it. The chief was here all morning. Your friend, Mr Wilde, was here too.’

  ‘I’m going to his house,’ I said.

  ‘Very good, sir. You know the way?’

  I left the sergeant and walked past him into the gloom, past the narrow, black entrance to the alley, now guarded by two policemen, and up the all-but-invisible street. So thick was the fog that I could not tell one house from another and started up the wrong front doorsteps twice before arriving correctly at number 16. I rang the bell. There was no answer. I peered up at the duncoloured building shrouded in a heavy veil of yellow mist. There were smudges of light at the windows on the upper floors. I rang again. I waited. I was turning over in my mind what best to do next, when I heard the rattle of keys and the pulling of a bolt. An anxious girl’s face peeped around the edge of the door. It was Mary, the Wildes’ young maid.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Dr Doyle,’ she whispered. ‘Come in. I thought it might be Mr Wilde. Mrs Wilde said not to let him in.’

  ‘Not let him in?’

  ‘He’s the worse for wear.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  The girl gave a nervous giggle as she opened the door to let me pass. ‘Oh, no. Mr William, I mean. Mr Oscar’s with the police. It’s been quite a day, all the comings and goings. Mr William was in a bad way.’

  The girl took my hat and dropped it as, all jitters, she helped me off with my coat. The gas jets in the sconces on the wall above the hallway table hissed and flared. ‘Where is Mrs Wilde?’ I asked. ‘Is she in?’

  ‘She’s changing for dinner, sir.’

  As the girl bent down to retrieve my hat, I heard footfall on the landing above and then Constance calling from the top of the stairs: ‘Is that you, Arthur? It’s you, isn’t it? I’m not decent, but you don’t mind, do you? You’re a doctor, after all.’

  Mary dropped my hat once more and scuttled away to the kitchen as I looked up to find Constance coming down the stairs, her hands held out towards me. She looked quite wonderful, in a way I had never seen her look before, with her hair pinned up and her face unpainted. She was wearing a Japanese kimono.

  ‘I look ridiculous, I know,’ she said, coming up and kissing me. As her hands touched mine, I felt them shaking. ‘It’s good to see you, Arthur,’ she said. ‘We’ve had quite a day here.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  ‘Willie’s been here and made a terrible scene – terrified poor Mary. Oscar’s having this supper party tonight and has invited Willie, but not his fiancée. And now Willie’s discovered that I’m going, but Lily hasn’t been asked and he’s incensed.’

  ‘The supper party is still happening?’

  ‘Yes – and Oscar says I have to come, which is why I’m changing now.’

  ‘Where is Oscar?’

  ‘With Mr Macnaghten – at the explosion.’

  ‘The explosion?’

  ‘You’ve not heard?’

  ‘What explosion? I know nothing.’

  ‘In Paradise Walk, about two hours ago – what time is it?’ She looked around at the clock on the wall. ‘Around lunchtime, it must have been – just after we got rid of Willie. It was quite a small explosion, but alarming all the same. Oscar went out to investigate. He was gone for an hour. We became quite anxious – Mary started crying. You know what girls are. And then Oscar came back with Macnaghten and they gave me telegrams to send. So much has been happening. I’m quite bewildered.’

  ‘Where are your boys?’

  ‘They’re with Oscar’s mother, thank heavens. They’re safe. Oscar can’t cope with them here. He says he can’t work with them in the house.’

  ‘How is Oscar?’

  ‘Now?’ She hesitated. ‘Excited, I think.’ She put her hands over mine. ‘I know that sounds strange, but, yes, excited. Almost mad.’ She looked up into my eyes and I saw tears in the corners of hers. ‘I sometimes think he is quite mad and I do not know what to do. I love him so very much.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘This morning, when we heard about the murder – the poor girl in the alley . . . You know about that?’

  ‘Yes. Oscar sent me a wire. That’s why I’ve come.’

  ‘When he came back from seeing the poor girl’s body he was white as a sheet – so shocked by what he’d seen. I gave him some brandy, and then Willie arrived while we were having lunch and there was this dreadful argument – and then the explosion occurred and the fire . . . ’

  Behind me, I heard the key turning sharply in the latch. The front door flew wide open and there stood Oscar in a whorl of yellow mist – like a ghastly apparition in an Adelphi melodrama. His cloak was swept back over his shoulder. He was wild-eyed and grinning like a man possessed.

  ‘Ah, here you are,’ he cried, laughing and pointing at me. ‘In at the kill, eh? And with my wife in your arms!’

  I broke abruptly away from Constance. ‘What’s the matter, Oscar?’

  He stepped in to the hallway, but held the door open. The gas jets flared once more. ‘Come, man, this is no time for romance. We must go. The carriage is waiting. Where’s your bag?’

  ‘I’ve brought no bag,’ I said.

  ‘Have you dropped it at the hotel already?’

  ‘I have no bag, Oscar.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to change for the party? We’re not in South Norwood now.’

  ‘I can’t come to the party, Oscar,’ I protested. ‘I came now because of your telegram – and Constance was kind enough to welcome me. But I cannot come to any party. You should cancel the supper, Oscar. Please.’

  ‘What?’ he bellowed. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Leastways, I cannot come. I really cannot. You must understand—’

  ‘Oh,’ he cried, suddenly clapping his hands. ‘Have no fear. She’s not coming, your little acrobat. You’re quite safe, Arthur. I should have told you. The cast list is changed altogether. Come now.’ He stepped back over the threshold beckoning me towards him. I picked up my hat and coat to follow.

  Constance called after him: ‘What time must I be there, Oscar?’

  ‘Eleven at the latest, my dear – but do change before you come. It’s a supper party, not a costume ball.’

  We climbed into the two-wheeler that stood waiting at the kerb-side. ‘I thought the street was closed,’ I said.

  ‘It was,’ said Oscar, settling back into his seat with a mighty sigh. ‘Macnaghten ordered it open again just a minute ago. He’s gone home to change. He’s had quite a day.’

  ‘And you, Oscar? How are you?’ He made no answer, but began to feel under his cloak for his cigarettes. ‘Remember
, I am your friend – and a doctor, too. You’re overwrought. It’s not good for your heart.’

  He turned and smiled at me. He appeared calmer now. ‘I know the golden rule: “Always behave as if nothing has happened, no matter what has happened.” It’s sound advice, but so very English and I’m profoundly Irish, I’m afraid.’ He lit his cigarette and chuckled softly.

  ‘What has happened?’ I asked.

  ‘So much,’ he said. ‘And there’s more to come – much more, “ere midnight’s frown and morning’s smile, ere thou and peace may meet.”’

  ‘Keats?’

  ‘Shelley.’ He gave me his familiar, reassuring pat on the knee. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Arthur. You were here at the start. You should be here at the finish, too.’

  ‘So what has happened today?’ I asked. ‘Another poor girl was found this morning? As before?’

  ‘Worse. She had been decapitated. And disembowelled.’

  ‘You saw the body?’

  ‘Only briefly. A glance, no more. It was enough. I’m not a doctor.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘The legs had been cut off, too. What was left were the arms and a bloodied torso.’

  ‘Like the torso found beneath the railway arch in Pinchin Street?’

  ‘And the torso found below ground in the vault in Whitehall – yes. The same.’

  ‘Was the head nearby?’

  ‘No – no head, no legs, no clothes, no jewellery, nothing. Just the torso dropped at the end of the alley, as before. The poor creature was lying on her back, her arms outstretched, crucified.’

  ‘Horrible.’

  ‘Unspeakable.’

  ‘And, of course, no one reported missing?’

  ‘Not yet – but I’d not expect it. It’s the pattern exactly as before.’

  ‘This is too much.’ I sighed. ‘Something must be done.’

  ‘Something will be done,’ said Oscar, peering out of the carriage window into the darkness, ‘and tonight.’

  ‘Tonight,’ I repeated. ‘Yes, tonight . . . ’ I looked at my friend’s turned head, perplexed. ‘What are these “revelations” you are promising for tonight, Oscar? Why are you even thinking of going ahead with the party?’