Anatomy of Evil

by Will Thomas

  Ponsonby raised his brow, considering the matter. “She would probably see through such a ruse, but I shall keep it in reserve if I need to use it.”

  “I know it may seem that the Yard is working perilously slow, but when the case is complete, I do not doubt that the record will show we worked swiftly and efficiently to capture a man whose name we do not even know.”

  “What say you to the argument that your purpose, the Yard’s purpose, is to anticipate and prevent such murders?”

  “When a murder is committed in London, Sir Henry, it is generally for financial gain or a result of domestic disturbance. The killer knows the victim, sometimes very well. These murders are unique, in that neither is the case and I doubt that the killer had ever met the victim before he killed her. His purpose for doing what he does is veiled, unless he finds some kind of emotional release by killing. He is opportunistic, which is akin to randomness. I suppose at some point he knows that he might kill again soon, but even he might not know whom or when. He might be thwarted by too many residents or constables in the area, but at some point the conditions are good and he will strike. It’s like a wolf searching for food. Most of the time he is not successful, but occasionally he is.”

  “Well, this wolf has been too successful for my taste.”

  “Mine, as well, if I may state the obvious, sir. He is damaging the hard-won reputation of the Metropolitan Police Service. It sells more copies for the newspapers to complain that we are incompetent and slow.”

  Though he had expressed little to me before, I could hear the frustration in the Guv’s voice. He hated, absolutely hated, being caught out. Generally, he could get ahead of a criminal’s plans and anticipate his next move, but this time, the killer himself didn’t know his next move.

  “I shall try to convey your words to Her Majesty, though I’m not sure she will understand them.”

  “You may tell her that whenever a murder actually occurs, we learn a great deal about the killer’s motives and methods. Two in one night has given us much to digest and discuss. We’re that much closer to tracking him to his lair.”

  Ponsonby nodded, but said nothing.

  “I could speak to her directly, if you require it,” my employer said.

  “That won’t be necessary,” the Private Secretary said. “I know best how to speak to her in language she will understand.”

  “Then I wish you good fortune.”

  “Thank you. Good hunting to you.”

  Barker stood. “Come, Thomas. Back to the Yard, to learn what has been discovered.”

  * * *

  Meadows caught me as soon as I walked through the doors of “A” Division.

  “Make tea, Constable,” he said. “Then report back here. We’ve had two bags of post this afternoon and we’ll need help sorting it.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said, seizing the brim of my hat.

  “Chop, chop, my lad. First the tea.”

  I went back to the kitchen where someone had tried unsuccessfully to make it in my absence. What he had created was a kind of leaf soup. They had opened a box of shortbread and it had been consumed down to the crumbs. Three things necessary to the detection of crime, in my opinion, are sugar, butter, and flour. I opened another tin, reminding myself to purchase more. Then I drained the soup and emptied the leaves into an ash can, before starting a new pot. Once it was brewing, I returned to the front desk.

  “What room, Sergeant?” I asked.

  “Down that hall, third door on your left.”

  I followed his instructions and found a kind of postal room. There were letters piled on the table, surrounded by constables opening and reading them. Perhaps the Ripper would communicate with us again and accidentally reveal something about himself. I pulled up a chair and seized a letter. I reached into my pocket and retrieved a jackknife so as not to damage potential evidence that might be inside.

  The first letter was from a woman who suspected her neighbor of being the Whitechapel Killer. He kept odd hours, glowered at her in a way she found threatening, and was less than civil when speaking to her. She provided his name and address for obviously he must be the man we were looking for. The letter would probably come to naught, but on the other hand, one never knew. A woman’s intuition can be quite accurate, sometimes.

  The second letter was long and rambling, written in a very small but precise hand, unsigned. The killings, the author maintained, were part of a vast European conspiracy on the part of a Jewish group known as the Illuminati, to destroy England’s way of life. The Rothschilds were mentioned as leaders in this organization, and the solution was to deport all persons of the Semite races back to their countries of origin, regardless of how many years their families had been in Britain. It has always been the plan of the Jews to destroy the Christian races, he wrote, etc., etc., etc.

  I’d have tossed the letter away, but for all I knew this writer might actually have been the Ripper himself. Any letter arriving had to be adequately read through and evaluated. It wasn’t my place to destroy it, no matter how banal and narrow-minded or insane I felt the message was.

  The third letter I opened was from the sheriff in the town of Knowle, outside Bristol. He was glad to tell us that Jack the Ripper was living in his village, and he was keeping a close eye on his movements. If the commissioner wished to travel by train to his station, they could apprehend the man together.

  A pair of hands seized my shoulders. I did not jump, but looked up into my employer’s smoky lenses.

  “Come, Thomas.”

  “What’s going on, sir?”

  “The postmortem on the fourth victim is about to begin.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Golden Lane is an optimistic-sounding street name where the City of London mortuary and coroner’s court resides. I don’t know if the Guv informed authorities in the City that we were working with Scotland Yard in this case, or if he kept silent about our current positions, but he had me change clothes, out of my Met uniform. We had become plainclothes detectives.

  There was a small operating theater, tiled in brick, with professional medical equipment and at least three doctors present, led by Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown, the official City coroner. When I looked around at the small crowd of men attending the proceedings, I noticed no one from Scotland Yard was there, save for us. I ventured the opinion that someone in the City Police owed Barker a favor.

  The postmortem chamber offered no place to sit, but there was a rail around the table on which the corpse lay, which both kept the audience from coming closer and provided a place to rest one’s elbows during the proceedings.

  Brown was a sturdily built man in his late forties with a curling mustache that gave him a jaunty look, belying his grim task. My attention was not on him, however, but rather on the unclothed form that lay on the table. When last I saw her, she lay in a pool of blood in Mitre Square, dressed in layers of clothing. Now she was pale and naked on a table, ready to be cut open. In spite of her occupation, I’m sure never in her life had she been so exposed in front of so many men.

  Twelve hours before, this woman, Catherine Eddowes, had been walking the streets, drinking with her friends, and looking to collect enough pennies for a bed for the night. She was fully alive with no thought in her mind that she might be lying here now, a half day later. She had opinions and plans, some of which extended beyond this afternoon and into the new week.

  “The victim,” Dr. Brown began, “was five foot three inches tall and forty-five years of age.”

  He began to detail the various external wounds on her person. Part of her ear had been cut off. Her eyelids had been slit. The tip of her nose had been removed. The upside down V-shaped cut in each cheek had swollen so that it looked worse than a simple mark on her skin.

  For some reason, I felt as if I would have liked Kate Eddowes alive, in a way I would not have liked the other victims. We had nothing in common, of course. I doubted she could read, and we were over twenty years apart in age. Howeve
r, in spite of those horrible wounds, I could see her face in life. I suspected she laughed often, in spite of her profession. She was the kind that got on well with everyone and did her best to brighten peoples’ days with a joke or a remark. She drank, it’s true, and she must have been a neglectful mother while in her cups, but I felt sorry for her. She didn’t deserve this. She didn’t deserve him.

  I watched Dr. Brown pick up a scalpel and, without preamble, begin to cut diagonally across her chest. Illogically, I expected the wound to bleed, but of course, all the blood in her body had begun to coagulate. The coroner made a Y incision which extended below her waist. With the aid of the other doctors, Brown pulled back the skin and prepared to remove the breastbone and front ribs.

  No doubt, she knew the Ripper was out and about. Her sisters in the profession chaffed one another about him. Perhaps they had considered themselves invulnerable. Reaching this age, in this profession, that was something, wasn’t it? The average age of death in Whitechapel was thirty-seven. Any more than that, and you count yourself one of the lucky ones. And anyway, what is a woman that age to do? Spend her fifties in bed, an invalid, being taken care of by your overworked children? That’s no kind of life.

  Brown lifted a large, purplish organ he had severed from the body and put it on the scale.

  “Weight of liver, 1.3 kilograms. I suspect Bright’s disease.”

  It was the drink. She never could put down that bottle. It was her reward when she finished a bad client, and there were always plenty of those. Brutes. Selfish men. Lunatics. Unwashed. She couldn’t trust anyone, but when they were gone, she owed herself a little celebration for getting through it. A pint or a glass of gin. Gin ’ot.

  I might have seen her, I told myself. She was here in these very streets, as I was. Leaning closer, I examined the face again, trying to picture it whole. A small brunette in a new bonnet she was proud of. She wasn’t young, but she might have been vivacious. She’d been pretty enough once to turn a head or two and she could still conjure a ghost of her former beauty. She understood the sashay and the come-along look, and had learned a thing or two in her years. You had to, in order to survive.

  One by one, the coroner was removing organs from the body and calling out weights and comments, which another doctor copied down in a book. Dr. Brown was very matter-of-fact, but then he did this sort of thing every day. He had little need for speculation, relying instead on observation.

  I, on the other hand, was a mass of speculation. Why had he cut her earlobes? Did he think they looked pretty that way? Did he think he had to do it before proceeding further down the body? What was the significance of the V-shaped notch he put in each cheek? Was he trying to beautify her again with his sharp knife?

  The coroner cut the back of her head with his scalpel, from one ear to the other. Without any change in expression, he slid his fingers into the cut and began to separate the tissues holding the scalp to the skull. It was time consuming, but he had all the time he needed. This was his work, after all. Perhaps he was already thinking about dinner. One flap of skin and hair lay on her forehead, and he reached for the bone saw to begin the process of sawing open the skull.

  She hadn’t deserved to be a casual prostitute. She might have been a respectable grandmother if only some man had successfully provided for her. Surely a chance for a real home and family might have been enough to make her quit the bottle. She might have once been very close to having everything she wanted in life. She’d stop taking clients like this. Just this final one, you know, to earn her bed. Just four pence. She’d earn that quick enough.

  Funny how a saw cutting through bone sounds just like you’d expect it would. I realized I was wincing and stopped. Cyrus Barker’s big arms were crossed. His brows had sunk behind his spectacles; he looked angry, or perhaps it was sheer professionalism. Was he as matter-of-fact as Brown, or more like me? What was in his mind at the moment, while a woman’s skull was being opened like a walnut right in front of him? Did the man feel anything?

  Dr. Brown took a small hammer and chisel to the skull and with a few taps it came free. Inside, the brain looked as pink and fresh as a rose or a carnation. It seemed impossible that it was not connected to anything living now and must inevitably decay.

  The spell was broken then. This thing on the table, sans brain or organs, could no longer be considered a person. It was but clay, fodder for the yawning grave. Brown weighed the brain then and clapped the skull cap back on the empty cavity, and stretched the skin of the scalp back over it. It went back in place, and no one looking at it would think that there was no brain inside it.

  Where was her soul, exactly? I wondered. She was a fallen woman. No doubt Spurgeon would say she was in hell right then. Another favorite of mine, George MacDonald, on the other hand, writer and mystic that he was, believed that after a time of penance, a loving God would take her to heaven. Was there such a place? I’d dearly like to think so, although my closest friend, Israel, had no need for Sheol and such things. Spurgeon or MacDonald? I had been a member of Spurgeon’s flock, but just this once I hoped he was wrong. And I’d like to think he’d wish the same thing himself.

  Brown had threaded a needle and was looping stitches across her mottled abdomen. Poor dear. I wondered what she would be buried in. Her clothes must be kept as evidence. I would pay for a nice, plain dress myself, if need be. Bury her like the grandmother she would have been had circumstances not been as they were. Give the old girl some proper dignity in her final departure.

  Again, I had that feeling of nakedness. All these men staring solemnly at her exposure. Even death was a kind of nakedness, with no life to clothe her in. Deprived of all dignity, stripped bare of humanity, displayed like something in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors for all the world to see.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I muttered, but I wasn’t. It wasn’t my stomach that wanted to reject this. It was my mind.

  Peeping Tom had his eyes put out with a hot poker for daring to look at Lady Godiva, or so the story goes. I understood that now. I didn’t want such a punishment, but understood it nonetheless.

  “Phillips,” Brown said.

  His assistant brought a canvas sheet stained with fluids from other postmortems and finally, finally, covered her obscene nakedness with it. Her shroud. At last she had earned it.

  “I must attend her funeral,” I said to Barker, as the men watching the spectacle had begun to leave.

  “I was going to give you the morning off, lad,” the Guv protested. “You’ve been working for weeks without a break.”

  “No, sir, I’d rather be there. I must see this thing through.”

  “Very well, Thomas. May I accompany you?”

  “If you wish, sir. I’d appreciate it.”

  We stepped into the hallway and out into the clean air of the autumn afternoon.

  “What thought you of your first postmortem? Was it instructional?”

  I tried to say something, but three thoughts came at once, like when someone hits random keys on a typewriting machine and they all jam together in the air.

  “Well, no matter,” he said. “It was a rite of passage.”

  * * *

  A private enquiry agent, in the course of his duties, is forced to attend a number of funerals. Many enquiries begin with a death, and it builds trust in a client to have an agent attend the service of the person who is often the victim. More than a few end with a funeral, as well, and for various reasons, difficult as it might be, one attends them as well, if for no other reason than to watch a murderer put into the ground for good. I have been to lavish funerals with dozens of carriages swathed in black silk and crepe, and I have been to one where I was the chief and only mourner. Some have been in full sunlight, others in a driving rain, and at least one required a pickaxe to break the frozen soil. Yet, among the many, I still vividly recall the funeral of Catherine Eddowes.

  I did not attend the burials of Mary Nichols or Annie Chapman, but I understood they
were sparsely attended. Unfortunates tend to shed relatives like a dog does its winter coat, and there are few upright citizens willing to be seen publicly grieving for a known prostitute. Eddowes’s funeral, on the other hand, was a circus. When Cyrus Barker and I arrived the following Monday, the streets were lined with people outside the Golden Lane Coroner Center, and some had let upper rooms nearby to look out upon the spectacle. One would have thought Kate Eddowes a member of one of London’s premier families.

  The funeral was to be at Ilford Cemetery, which I must admit was shocking to me. Apparently, Eddowes was to be buried in hallowed ground, in spite of her occupation. Someone, some benefactor, had not only put up the money for a proper funeral, he must have also pulled a few legal strings. She was brought out by City Police pallbearers in a coffin of polished elm with oak moldings, and lain in a glass-sided hearse. A beautiful wreath of white lilies was placed on the coffin. Behind was a mourning carriage carrying four of Catherine Eddowes’s sisters. Whatever they had thought of her life, when she was sleeping rough and giving herself to men for mere pennies, they were there when she was the toast of Whitechapel. Also there was John Kelly, her common-law husband. He was fiftyish, with short, spiky hair and a collar too tight for his neck. If anything he was cowed by the sisters he traveled with and seemed to keep to himself.

  “Drunk,” Barker said to me.

  “Kelly?”

  “The crowd. Part of it, anyway. There was a wake last night in many of the public houses. Many stayed up all night.”

  I looked closer. Some of the men had donned morning coats and crepe-lined top hats, but they had been put on hastily over their normal clothes. The women had fetched bird-covered hats and bonnets from closets, and knit shawls, but had not polished their shoes. Some of the clothes they wore seemed theatrical, as if pinched from a costumer, and much was mismatched, as if it were the best they could do at short notice. Jenkins had coordinated with Mac to have our mourning apparel brought to our rooms. I felt overdressed, but I had promised myself that I would be there and prepared.