My voice sounded to me thin and weak. As I left the pub I was suddenly afraid that I had not been heard, or had been taken for a madwoman roaming about, whispering terrible things into the night, then disappearing. At any rate, I heard no shouts behind me, no banging of the pub door to indicate people were following me. Nor was there anyone outside, no poor creature giving up any hope of better shelter for the night and seeking refuge among the tombstones, no tart looking for a last customer – no one. It was the dead hour of the night when even in that area few are abroad, all must sleep, cowering in whatever cranny they can find.
The man had turned in Fournier Street and I was spent. I knew too that the longer I followed him the more likely it was that he would spot me. I remembered that the vicarage of the church lay beside the side wall of the great building, in Fournier Street, not a hundred feet from where I was. I would bang on the door and hope the vicar, or a servant, would be alert enough to raise a hue and cry. I could do no more.
What I had forgotten was that between the church and the vicarage were the large wrought-iron gates, wide enough to admit a hearse. They must have been unlocked for as I went gasping past I was seized. One hand went over my mouth, I was borne back, stumbling to keep my footing on the damp flagstones, and there he threw me back. My head hit the church wall as I fell. Next I knew, he had his hands round my throat and was choking me. I felt one hand release me, while the other continued to squeeze my throat. I felt a fumbling in his pocket, heard the click of his knife on the paving stones. He was ready to kill me with it. As I tried to roll over to escape him both his hands were round my throat again, tightening. I lost consciousness, smelling his foul breath in my nostrils and imagining my own body, dead, limp and ripped, lying by the church wall like a bloodied doll.
The hands must have slackened as the murderer heard, or just felt, the woman approaching. It was only a glimmer of a white face I saw, with a dark shawl round it. It came closer. I began to struggle. As the hands tightened round my throat, to silence me I suppose, I managed, I think, to croak her name. She must have heard. A voice cried, ‘Mary!’ She launched herself towards me. There seemed to be another figure behind her. Suddenly the madman’s grip loosened, then fell away. I sank to the slimy paving, gasping, nearly unconscious. As I revived a little a terrible anxiety swept over me. I managed to raise myself from the ground on my elbow and look sideways to where, a few feet away, two figures – men – struggled on the ground. I crawled towards them, saw a knife in the air held by the man on top, ready to descend. The other man’s hand grappled for the knife from below. Then I saw a woman’s skirt and long shawl, her arm and hand, trying to grasp the knife. I heard metal clang on to stone nearby. The knife had been dropped. Still sprawling, I felt for it all over the greasy paving, my fingers meeting shiny clumps of rag, paper, all manner of things. Then I found it and got my fingers on the handle. The men were still fighting. I heard dreadful gasps, the sounds of struggle.
I had the knife. I crawled to my sister’s side. Jim Bristow was pinned on the ground under the madman’s body. His eyes bulged, for the man had him by the throat. The other man’s breath sobbed also, for both Jim’s hands, in turn, were round his throat. It was like the act of love, the one man on top of the other, the gasping, the wrestling and twitching of the bodies. I raised the knife and brought it down, feeling it go through coat, flesh, into nothing. The murderer’s body bucked against it. I pulled out the knife, gasping with the effort. I pushed it in again, through coat, flesh, and this time struck bone. I pulled myself forward a little, leaned in, pressed half the weight of my body on it. His body bucked again, resisted, sagged, with a sigh. He was spent. He had often spent himself with a knife, as a woman died. Now it was his turn.
Jim rolled him off and lay, hauling in long breaths. Mary and I were both on our knees, I with my head drooping, near-unconscious again. I barely knew where I was or what I had done. Mary was saying, ‘My God. Oh, my God,’ over and over again. Jim sat up, still breathless, and croaked, ‘That must be him.’
The body lay face down in the dark. I heard Mary and Jim turning him over. ‘He’s young,’ I heard her say. I crawled the little way to the body and gazed down on the face of the killer. The blue eyes were open. Horribly, the eyelids flickered. The blanched face, a pimple by the lip, the red-brown, slightly curling hair, were those of Churchill, Brewer’s corrupted clerk.
What trouble lay behind the mind of the well-cared-for widow’s son? What in God’s name, apart from Brewer’s training in seducing women for the rent, had brought him to murder? There’s a kind of darkness in all our minds we can never admit to; the sources are different, the feelings are different, but there’s no one, whoever they are, man or woman, who doesn’t carry their own evil seed saved up inside them. They deny it, but know secretly it’s there, pray it will never find fertile ground, sprout, grow and bear wicked fruit. Churchill was one who, in youth, before he had any chance to make something better of himself, had been introduced to vice, whose whole training had gone against the vice, and in the conflict between desire and a conscience perhaps too strictly trained had become bestial – no, worse than a beast, for no one but a man who has a brain and can suffer conflict, and have perverse thoughts, can make himself so atrocious.
And there he lay, the monster, dead, or so I hoped, and there was Jim, flat on his back, and Mary and I kneeling.
Jim was up. ‘Drag him into the shadows of the church wall,’ he said in a low voice.
‘I can’t,’ I said. Everything was spinning round me.
‘I’ll drag him. You drag her,’ he told Mary. She pulled me up and supported me as I staggered to the wall, then slid me down, so that my back was against it. I was shaking and could not stop. I heard Jim hauling back the body of the dead man a little further off. Mary stood in front of me. ‘Bastards,’ I said though my teeth were chattering violently. ‘A pretty pair you are.’
Jim arrived. ‘I saved your life,’ he mumbled.
Mary Jane, tougher than either of us, said, ‘Who is he?’ nodding in the direction of the corpse.
‘What’s going on?’ said an old man’s voice weakly. He was along the wall, a little way off, a bundle of rags and lice, trying to shelter.
‘Shut up or you’ll regret it,’ hissed my sister.
‘He’s killed a woman in your room. He’s the Ripper,’ I told her.
‘Oh my God. It’s poor Amelia,’ Mary said.
‘Who’s dead? Another one?’ said the cracked old voice of the bundle of rags.
‘Shut your bloody face or I’ll kill you,’ Mary said fiercely, then she said to me in a voice getting higher and higher, ‘She borrowed the room. Is she dead? What’s he done?’
‘Shut up, you stupid cow,’ said Jim to Mary in a low, violent tone. He crouched down, pulling her after him. So there we were, terrified and hissing at each other in the darkness against a damp wall, with the dead body of the murderer not three feet away. Meanwhile Jim whispered, ‘This is no bloody good. A woman dead and here’s another corpse. What are we going to do?’
I was saying, weakly, ‘He is the Ripper,’ when the final horror came – he wasn’t dead! A groan came from where the body was lying. Mary clutched my arm convulsively – a grip of iron. ‘Oh God. Oh God, he’s not dead.’ she moaned. Jesus Christ help us – what can we do?’ At least the old man was quiet, terrified.
Jim was apparently calm. ‘Go and sit on his face, Mary,’ he ordered in a whisper, but his voice shook.
‘I’ve got in enough trouble doing what you said,’ said Mary, with a sob. ‘I can’t. You can’t make me.’
‘Go on,’ he urged. Then he sighed a frantic sigh and crept off on his hands and knees in the direction of the dying young man, the insane killer, the tormented beast, Churchill. There was a scuffling noise, then a terrible silence. Jim crawled back in the darkness. There was a pause. ‘It’s done. He’s better off dead,’ he said.
‘All right. Let’s get away now,’ hissed Mary.
&n
bsp; ‘Yes. A body in your room, and another here, then a manhunt and who knows what the outcome of all that will be? We could end up heroes or on the scaffold, convicted of two murders. Two? Four, five, six murders. I don’t want to hang,’ he whispered. ‘Nor do you, I suppose.’
‘Get rid of him, then.’
‘Easy said,’ Jim told her.
There was some singing in the street, not twenty yards away. ‘Let’s leg it,’ urged Mary.
Now came a steady pacing. ‘Copper,’ said Jim, who could tell the tread.
It passed. Jim whispered, ‘Look there’s that old geezer there and God knows who else. We’ve got to get rid of the body.’
‘It means the river,’ I said in a low voice.
But it was over half a mile to the Thames, past the pubs, the people, the patrolling police.
‘Hang on,’ Jim said. ‘There’s a cart works behind here.’ He was off quickly and quietly.
Mary and I hung on, shivering, with our corpse. I clutched my cloak round me, tried not to make a noise as I coughed and coughed.
‘You all right? Where’ve you been?’ she asked.
‘In hospital. Where’ve you been? That’s the point.’
‘I was going to find you. Jim thought …’ She seemed ashamed. And had reason to be.
‘You’ve made a fool of me,’ I wheezed. ‘Both of you. And Jim’s made a bigger fool of you.’
‘I know it. He kept it from me at first, that you were looking for me. Then he said …’ She sighed. ‘All I want now is to get out of this lot. And Amelia dead. My God,’ she murmured. ‘Mary Anne, I’m sorry I let Jim talk me into keeping quiet about where I was. He could see you had money, and he wanted some and you know what he is – persuasive.’ She broke off. Then she said, ‘I saved your life, though.’
There was a rattling noise. Jim was back with a handcart. ‘Help get him in,’ he said. We got the limp corpse into the cart as quietly as we could. Jim threw some sacks that had been at the bottom of the cart over him. ‘You two had better hide where you can. I’ll do it.’ He took the handles. ‘Save me from the scaffold if I’m caught,’ he said, and I could tell he wondered if we would. It would be easier not to, and he’d foxed both of us, one way and another. It’s a rotten trick to sleep with sisters, rotten to get one to deceive the other, but he was a rotten bastard, headed for the gallows from birth. When all was said and done, he knew it, and so did we.
Nevertheless, after he’d trundled the body a little way, we agreed between ourselves to follow and see what happened. I was shuddering with cold, my feet like ice. He saw us behind him as he pushed the cart across Whitechapel Road. The gas flared, there were people about and a couple of policemen, plus a police wagon, sorting out a pub fight. He did not dare come near us, or call out, for fear of attracting attention. He cut from alley to alley, where it was dark, creaking along. We shadowed him.
Down by the railway goods depot a couple of cheery young men called out above the sound of shunting engines. ‘Look out, mate. There’s a couple of tarts behind you.’ We crept down Tower Hill, under the looming walls of the Tower, and at the bottom we turned off, found a set of little steps going down to the water off a quiet street, got the cart down, heaved the body into the dark gurgling water and the cart in after. Then we ran.
They saw me back to London Wall, the border dividing the dark area of London from the light. There we separated, Jim having handed me two sovereigns, the first and last money I ever got from him in my life.
This is how, I believe, the man called Jack the Ripper met his end. They never found his body. They have never found out who he was, as far as I know. He wasn’t anybody, by the time he died, just a man gone so far wrong he was no longer human, who killed six poor women no one would otherwise have bothered about.
I give my account now, and sign it with my own name. Possibly this is the last time I will ever use it. Once I was Mary Anne Kelly, now I’m Mary Anne something else, tomorrow I shall be somewhere else, someone else, and later perhaps somewhere else and someone else again. What’s in a name, when all’s said and done? In recalling those terrible events of a few months in the year 1888 I feel fortunate to be alive, unlike those other obscure, needy women fixed forever as victims by their names, Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and the one who even now is not known by her proper name, but is called Mary Jane Kelly.
Bibliography
Red Lights on the Prairies, Jarmes H. Gray
Popular Songs of the Nineteenth Century, Richard Jackson
The British Music Hall, Peter Davison
Costume and Fashion, James Laver
Costume in Pictures, Phyllis Cunningham
Fashion in Underwear, Elizabeth Ewing
Music Hall, Roy Hudd
The Last Spike, Pierre Berton
Jack the Ripper, Colin Wilson and Robin Odell
A Casebook on Jack the Ripper, Richard Whittington-Egan
The Times, August-November 1888
East End 1888, William J. Fishman
The Ripper Legacy, Martin Howells and Keith Skinner
Jack the Ripper, Peter Underwood
Jack the Ripper, Paul Begg
The Complete Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow
The Murders of the Black Museum, Gordon Honeycombe
Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, Stephen Knight
A Note on the Author
HILARY BAILEY was born in 1936 and was educated at thirteen schools before attending Newnham College, Cambridge. Married with children, she entered the strange, uneasy world of '60s science fiction, writing some twenty tales of imagination which were published in Britain, the USA, France and Germany. She has edited the magazine New Worlds and has regularly reviewed modern fiction for the Guardian. Her first novel was published in 1975 and she has since written twelve novels and a short biography. She lives in Ladbroke Grove, London.
Discover books by Hilary Bailey published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HilaryBailey
After the Cabaret
All the Days of My Life
As Time Goes By
A Stranger to Herself
Cassandra
Connections
Elizabeth and Lily
Fifty-First State
Hannie Richards
In Search of Love, Money and Revenge
Mrs Rochester
Polly Put the Kettle On
Mrs Mulvaney
The Cry from Street to Street
Miles and Flora
The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
First published in Great Britain 1992 by Constable & Company Ltd
Copyright © 1992 by Hilary Bailey
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise
make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means
(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,
printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the
publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 9781448209361
eISBN: 9781448209378
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