‘It’s just that gang from Stepney pinching money from tarts.’
‘It was done by a copper who did in that other one, Polly Nichols.’
A woman said, ‘What do they expect, these women? Stands to reason they’ll get murdered.’
‘Poor souls. It’s not their fault – they’re only trying to keep body and soul together,’ claimed another.
‘Not with him about,’ said a robust man’s voice. ‘Never mind souls, you can’t even keep your body together with him on the prowl.’
There was a slap and an enraged shout. ‘Show a little respect,’ said a woman.
‘And it ain’t you in fear of being killed and ripped up,’ another woman said.
And the voices went on as I stood, deathly chilled, in all the hubbub.
‘Asking for it, I say.’
‘My brother reckons somebody he works with did it – Joseph Smith, that’s his name.’
‘Only a heathen could do it.’
‘He wants tearing apart, whoever he is. I’d kill him.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’
‘Them women, unfortunate as they may have been, was all Christians, not Jews, so what do you think?’ asked someone.
‘He knows the neighbourhood, that’s for sure,’ someone else said.
‘He gets away quickly, probably with blood on him, but nobody ever sees him. He’s got a bolthole somewhere.’
‘Must be local,’ said a gloomy voice.
‘Could be a nob, with a carriage waiting. He just jumps in, blood and all, and off they go,’ said someone else.
‘A carriage?’ came a scornful voice. ‘In Hanbury Street at six in the morning? It’d attract more attention than an elephant.’
‘A woman round Brick Lane heard the news and she miscarried.’
‘There’s organs from that poor woman they still haven’t found.’
I pushed out of the pub, saying I’d come in later to find Jack. I thought I’d go back to the last address I’d had for Mary, Donaldson’s Buildings, and try again for news of her. I didn’t think the men there would dare to threaten me this time, even in that obscure spot. There were now too many policemen everywhere. Suppressing my queasy feelings, for Donaldson’s Buildings was very close to where two of the women had been killed, I set across Whitechapel Road, for Commercial Street, where men and women going about their business were doing so in a state of extra vigilance, as though they might see or hear something to tell them more of the crime. Annie Chapman’s had been a poor, obscure life, I imagined, ending up on the streets of Whitechapel, heading fast for an unmarked pauper’s grave. Now her name was travelling from tongue to tongue. She’d achieved fame, by having her guts ripped out in a back yard.
In the court of Donaldson’s Buildings all was quiet. A fat woman in a black dress covered by a grey apron was furiously sweeping a tangle of peelings, the heel of a loaf, some rags, away from her front door. She gave me an earful about the habits of the people next door, which, she told me when I could get a question in, was number 11, the place where my sister had lived a month before. The tenants were pigs, who threw their leavings, including the contents of chamber pots, out of the windows shamelessly night and day. Only last night someone had done this again, as I could tell, if I had a nose. It was a battle to keep decent. She’d lived there nine years, had two sons in steady work, but the court had been going steadily down for years, the buildings being colonized by foreigners, Jews, bog-Irish, all sorts, great numbers of them crammed in like pigs in a sty, no chance to keep clean even if they wanted to. Once upon a time this had been a decent space. Poor but decent. Decent working folk lived there, who kept themselves decent, went to church of a Sunday, and work of a Monday, kept their kids shod and fed and in order. Now it was a cesspit, full of foreigners, criminals and if it had not been she was in charge of the house and had an amicable arrangement with the landlord, she and her boys would have cleared out years ago. I agreed with everything, nodding sagely and saying ‘Yes,’ trying to interject an enquiry.
‘Fah!’ she exclaimed in disgust, kicking a rag into the heap of rubbish she was creating. ‘Bloody clouts. Can you believe it? These women haven’t the simple decency to keep their monthly rags to themselves. Animals are cleaner. Any animal you care to name is cleaner than that.’
‘I’m looking for Mary Kelly,’ I managed to say. She reached into the doorway for a dustpan and brush, began to push the rubbish into a dustpan, then tip it into a big paper sack from a warehouse.
‘Mary Kelly,’ she said. ‘Mary Kelly – yes, I can tell you about Mary Kelly.’ She’d been there with her husband – there was a wealth of scepticism in her tone as she pronounced the word – but had left about a week ago with a big trunk of clothes, not a sheet or a saucepan to her name, of course, but could anyone believe in a woman who had to borrow a kettle to make a cup of tea, pawned it, no doubt, to buy drink, or on hard times, but had a trunk of clothes, silk petticoats a-plenty, though, no doubt, not a pair of drawers to wear under them. ‘Out late, up late,’ she added. ‘Neither of them working.’
She finished with the rubbish and pushed in the top of the sack.
‘I’m her sister,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to find her.’
She didn’t apologize for her remarks, and her expression suggested neither of us was worth spitting on, our affairs of no interest. She shook her head.
‘You don’t know where she went?’
She shook her head again. A woman, two children in tow, came hurrying down the alleyway and into the court. When she saw the other she broke into a run. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she was crying. ‘Mrs Severn, have you heard? I don’t know where to put myself. There’s another woman been murdered, cut to ribbons in a back yard down Hanbury Street, just near the brewery.’
‘What? When?’ exclaimed the other woman.
‘Last night. I’m shaking all over. There’s a madman out there. The whole neighbourhood’s full of coppers. But I asked one and he says they don’t know who he is. What are we going to do?’
Both women were now upset, the children staring from face to face in terror. I left the court. I was now only a week away from Mary. A few days earlier that knowledge would have been a comfort. Now, the near certainty that she was still in Whitechapel and leading the same old life frightened me. Nor was it much consolation that she had a man to protect her, for if she was a whore, as it appeared, then he was probably a pimp, so how close would he be if she was in danger? If he wasn’t the danger itself, I thought.
I went straight to Cora Mundy’s, entering the very territory where the woman had been killed. Here the women stood talking in low voices in knots and stared at me gravely as I went along, alone. On a corner by a wall my eye lit on two bold little villains practising disembowelling their sister on the pavement, with a stick. The victim was screaming. A young woman in rusty black and an old bonnet hurled herself from a doorway on the group, abusing the boys, threatening them with a beating. A policeman was running towards the noise as I passed on, though it was only a little child screaming.
At Mrs Mundy’s the room was crowded, but not noisy. A group of labourers stood by the bar drinking, four women were supping stout at a table, two men in bowlers, clerks perhaps, were drinking rum, and the only laughter came from three drunk Swedish sailors who were pushing each other in a corner, getting black looks. Cora wasn’t there. I went up to the bar and waited. Nearby at a table was a family group, father, mother, a pretty daughter, two burly youths. The family man was saying earnestly, ‘I don’t care what you say. I say you two pack up here and now and go down to my father’s in Suffolk, stay there in his stable, give him a hand in the fields. I don’t want you about until this trouble’s over. This place isn’t safe for women at present.’
‘Oh dad,’ the girl protested, ‘it’s only street women what are getting killed in the middle of the night.’
‘So far,’ her father said. ‘But it doesn’t have to stop at that.’
Cora Mundy came
out of the back room, face set like a barometer at shock and gloom. It altered when she saw me. ‘Mary – Mary, my dear. I know why you’re here. How you must be feeling! My heart goes out to you.’ How the women of the East End loved their theatricals, their dramas, heaving bosoms, screams and sobs.
She took me in for a moment. I thought there’d been another murder, one I hadn’t heard of yet, and that the victim was Mary Jane. I stood there in doubt, half believing this awful theory, but at the same time knowing perfectly well what she wanted was to clasp me as I screamed and fainted, roused up, swore revenge, sobbed, fainted again. Then she could send a boy running for the doctor, tell everyone later she had no idea I’d take it like that, but I’d gone white as a sheet, she’d barely had time to catch me as I fell, for a moment thought me dead, the doctor had said I was within an inch of my life.
As I opened my mouth to ask what she meant a robust shout interrupted. ‘Come off it, Mundy. What are you on about? Leave Mary alone.’
I turned round to see Rosie Levi pushing through. She slammed half a sovereign on the bar, said to Mrs Mundy, ‘Come on, get us a drink, Cora, and bring it over.’ Then she took me by the arm and pulled me into the far corner of the bar.
‘What did she mean, her heart goes out to me?’ I asked.
‘She knows you’ll be worried about your Mary with this villain about, that’s all,’ Rosie said. ‘She’s making a meal of it. Well, it’s not her sort he’s threatening, is it?’
She pushed me through a gap in some backs and followed herself. I sat down opposite two young men and a young woman in a perky pink satin bonnet with feathers on it, which did not chime well with her reddened eyes, her blue eyeshadow above them or her pallid face.
Rosie said to one of the men, ‘Trust Cora Mundy. This poor woman here, Mary Kelly, is looking for her sister round here and Cora’s trying to pretend she’s been done in by the madman.’
‘Well, I pity you,’ said the girl in the pink hat. ‘Not knowing.’ She coughed. ‘I pity all of us – with this horror round us.’
‘No point in jumping at shadows, is there?’ Rosie said stoutly. ‘Look at the odds. There’s thousands of women in Whitechapel –‘
‘The odds shorten if you’re a whore,’ one of the men felt obliged to point out.
‘Oh God, what are we going to do?’ wailed the girl.
‘You’ve got us, darlings,’ said the man, almost a boy, really. His name was Toby. He had golden curls poking out from under a smart black cap and a red and white patterned neckerchief. His friend, Tom, had long dark hair and a gold, or nearly gold watch-chain across a white kid waistcoat. The East End lads are like women; they’ll spend every penny they’ve got on clothes to make a flash appearance, never mind the rent. Neither of these young men was above nineteen; they’d have the education of four-year-olds, be as mischievous as boys of nine and as wicked as men of fifty. In a place where all felt sobered, only they and the laughing Swedes were cheerful. I could see they’d spotted that when whores are afraid pimps come into their own. As they say, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
The potman had told me Jack Armitage would be back at six o’clock, so I stayed where I was for the afternoon. Tom and Toby told how they had gone round some farms in Surrey, robbing them. ‘Easier there,’ said Toby. ‘Folks in the country don’t expect cunning robbers like ourselves. All you’ve got to worry you is dogs, and I’m a dab hand with dogs, I am.’
Meanwhile the crowd in the alehouse ebbed as evening came.
Tom confessed to, or boasted of, a murder conducted in the course of a robbery in Hackney. Rosie did not believe a word they said, I could tell.
Mrs Mundy came up with refills, saying, ‘If this goes on, it’s going to be bad for trade, I can tell you that. They’re saying a copper did it.’
A boy came in with a parcel of something for Cora, a toffee apple on a stick in the other hand. He waved it about. ‘Got it down Hanbury Street. A bloke’s set up a stall, there’s that many there. The neighbours are charging sixpence to go in and look down over the yard where the woman died. There’s blood on the fence where the man escaped.’
‘So they haven’t caught him yet?’ asked Mrs Mundy in a lugubrious tone.
‘Nah,’ he sneered. ‘They’re just getting in each other’s way and falling over each other.’
‘They should use bloodhounds,’ Toby observed.
‘Anyway,’ said the boy, ‘it’ll be dark soon. Any of you ladies like an escort home? I’ll do it for a tanner.’
‘A lot of help that would be,’ said Rosie. ‘Push off, you monster.’
‘What are we going to do?’ said Ella of the red eyes, not for the first time. ‘I daren’t go out tonight. I daren’t stop at home, by myself, neither.’
‘We’ll come with you, just as a favour,’ Tom said.
‘I’d better go up west,’ she said. ‘It’s safer there.’ She had a coughing fit.
‘You’ve got more chance of dying of that cough than getting murdered,’ Rosie told her. ‘You ought to go to the doctor.’
‘Come on, love,’ said Toby, taking her arm. ‘Come with us. We’ll see you all right.’ She was taken from the room by Tom and Toby, one on either side, she looking back at us fearfully in the doorway as they dragged her out.
Rosie looked at me and shrugged. ‘Silly cow,’ she said. ‘She’s wondering if they did it, but she still goes with them.’
‘You don’t know who to trust,’ I said. ‘You told me you were scared, didn’t you?’ She nodded. ‘You don’t seem scared now.’
She shook her head. ‘I suppose it’s worse worrying about a thing when no one else is. Then you think you’re mad as well. Like I said, the whole neighbourhood’s falling apart. Look here, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you get some handbills printed for Mary? Offer a reward. Get boys to run round giving them to people. Of course we know half the ignorant pigs round here can’t read, but those who can will tell them what can’t. My uncle Lemuel’s a printer. He keeps the press in his back yard. He’ll do it overnight for you. On Monday he’ll get some dirty kids and give them sixpence each to put the bills round the streets. We can go there now.’
‘I was going back to Jack Armitage’s to see if there was any news,’ I told her.
‘Let’s do that, then go to my uncle’s.’
As we left a man carolled out, ‘Watch out, girls, or you’ll wake up in an alley with your guts hanging out.’
A woman standing by the bar with a pint pot in her hand smacked him round the face with her old black handbag, taking him by surprise. ‘You ponce,’ she exclaimed. ‘How dare you joke about things like that? You’re a brute, you are.’
‘It’s only the tarts, missus,’ he said with his hand to his face.
‘Only the tarts?’ she said furiously. ‘Only the tarts?’ She downed the rest of her pint. ‘Men!’ she cried. ‘They’ll stand together whatever they’ve done. It’s enough to make you bloody well weep.’
Rosie and I left, grinning and a bit drunk on Mrs Mundy’s gin. We crossed Whitechapel Road to Jack Armitage’s, eating fish and chips as we went.
‘Maybe I’ll find a client in the pub,’ muttered Rosie.
‘Christ, Rosie,’ I said. ‘Not tonight of all nights.’
‘I’ve got to live,’ she said. There was a cold wind off the river, and it was now dark. ‘He’ll have had his fill of guts for the time being, whoever he is.’
Rosie gripped my arms as we went down the side street to the pub. ‘Two against one, at any rate,’ she muttered.
Inside, Jack Armitage was back behind the bar. ‘How’s the wife?’ I asked.
Rosie put a gin in my hand. He shook his head. ‘They had to cut her,’ he said. ‘The baby’s all right, a great big boy.’
‘She’ll be right as rain in a week or two,’ I told him.
‘I hope so,’ he said unhappily. ‘My God. You should have heard her screams when they wheeled her off. One of the nurses hit her, to shut her up. Fancy stri
king a woman in labour.’ He was badly shaken.
‘Bitches, them nurses,’ Rosie said.
He looked at her sharply. ‘Are you two out alone? Are you barmy?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t you heard what’s happened?’
‘Haven’t heard anything else,’ declared Rosie.
I drank my gin. I was muzzy now. I barely understood, at first, what Jack told me: ‘… saw her down Middlesex Street last Sunday morning.’
‘What?’ I cried.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I was going to send you a note to your lawyers, but this business with the old woman put me off my stroke. Well, we went down there to get her out of the house; she was brooding and getting more and more miserable about how she might have to go to the hospital; so we took a stroll down Petticoat Lane to get one or two little things. So, while she’s rummaging on a stall down the bottom, the Aldgate end, I just caught sight of this woman I thought was Mary going up towards Wentworth Street, right in the middle of the road, strolling along, cool as you please, wearing a nice red dress with a bustle, and bonnet to match, very tasteful and ladylike – I know it was her, because just as I caught sight of her and thought that’s Mary, she turned her head sideways to look at something on a stall, so I saw her face quite clear. I was only about ten yards away but there were people moving to and fro. Just then, two fellows crossed behind her and cut off my view. Then more people got in the way, so by the time the crowd had cleared I’d lost sight of her. She must have turned off somewhere. I ran up to see if I could find her, but she’d disappeared by then. I ran back and asked the old woman if she’d seen her, but she’d seen nothing but an old fish kettle she was trying to get a bit cheaper.’
I stared at him. He was a dependable man. He would never have told me this story unless he’d been as good as certain he’d seen Mary.
‘There was a bloke with her,’ he went on. ‘When I first glimpsed her she was arm in arm with him, leaning up against him, lovey-dovey style. Then she pulled away a bit to look at whatever it was.’
The Cry from Street to Street Page 17
