by F. G. Cottam
I’m hard to hit. I’ll take blows when I can’t avoid them but I’m generally sliding off the punch, pretty difficult to catch flush and daze. The Boilerhouse was a dazer. Everything he threw with either hand was aimed at knocking me senseless and putting me down for the count. By the end of the third he was breathing pretty heavily. Every punch that doesn’t land has to be brought back by its owner. Inaccuracy is fatiguing.
He should have gone to the body with those great, swinging assaults of his. It’s much harder to get the body out of the way of a blow. But he was a head-hunter and he wasn’t in the business of learning from what wasn’t working in the fight. It had worked for him before and like a dumb beast he was stubborn.
I looked to land a short left up into the floating rib. It was a coal-shovel of a shot, the hardest I was capable of delivering and if I landed it once in every round, I was content. It pushed the rib up into the lung, forcing out air and inflicting a withering hurt on its recipient. One good one of those in every round and by the ninth my man was generally ready to go.
It was the tenth for the Boilerhouse. By then his strength was counting against him. He could barely lift his huge arms to shape a guard. I feinted past his feeble jab, set my feet flat and clipped his chin to right and left with two heavy hooks. You do that and the brain swivels in the jelly around it and, with most men, the lights go out. I don’t think my opponent was endowed with the biggest of brains, but he followed the form and hit the deck, going down in stages, like a felled tree.
There was a hush, suddenly. I looked around, panting with the effort of that final combination, my knuckles raw and throbbing, alert to the anger an upset can unleash; the hurled bottles and coins, the mob rush of disgruntled gamblers armed with dusters and the cosh.
Applause broke out. ‘Bravo,’ someone said. One of the Boilerhouse’s handlers climbed into the ring and raised my arm. ‘Let’s hear your appreciation for the Irish champion,’ he bawled at the spectators, ‘brought over from Dublin especially for your delectation.’
I was the champion of nothing. I’d been in London seven months. I’d walked the five miles there from a rented hovel. But it was quick thinking I rewarded with a wink, knowing he was good for the five guineas I’d earned and that he’d flattered the crowd into thinking they’d been treated to a pedigree encounter, rather than a brawl between a bully and an opponent rusty, past his best and on the slide.
They gave me my winnings. I dressed and went to take the watch from my pocket and remembered I’d had to pawn it three days earlier. I didn’t want to hang about and though there were plenty of them in the streets as I walked back the way I’d come, I didn’t want to ask a bobby the time lest the accent raise suspicion. Only copper-bottomed cockneys are above it in the current fraught climate.
I had the feeling of being followed. It wasn’t dangerous in Whitechapel because there were too many police around for someone to risk a street robbery. Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride had seen to that with their slaughter two days earlier. There were two pursuers, both about my height judging from their stride-length and they sounded like they were wearing quality boots.
They were neither skilled at tracking a man, nor poor, I didn’t think, wondering what sinister purpose could be making them duplicate my route. My choices were giving them the slip or confronting them. My hands were sore from the beating they’d tattooed in the ring on my ox of an opponent and I didn’t want another, unpaid fight. On the other hand by now my dander was up and so I turned under a lamp post and folded my arms to wait for their approach.
When they got near enough, I recognized one of them. He was Dr. Robert Anderson, the CID chief in charge of the Ripper investigation. The man with him wore a clerical collar. They walked sedately into the yellow spread of gas light and Anderson said, ‘A superb exhibition of pugilism, Mr. Barry. Now we’re well away from the eyes and ears of Whitechapel, might my colleague and I tempt you with the offer of a celebratory drink?’
‘I was set for a drink anyway,’ I said, ‘just as soon as I reached a quarter friendlier than the one we’ve all recently left.’
‘You’ve certainly earned one,’ the clergyman said. ‘That fellow was a formidable size.’
‘The bigger they come, Father,’ I said, in convivial mood since I’d won the bout and wasn’t about to have my throat cut for my winnings.
‘Quite so,’ he said.
‘There’s a pub not far from here does a very decent glass of porter,’ Anderson said. ‘Perhaps we could tempt you into having a pint of oysters too.’
‘Unless you’re a stout drinker, being a Dublin man,’ the clergyman said.
‘This is Father Jeffries,’ Anderson said.
I shook both their hands. I said, ‘Stout or porter would suit perfectly. I’ve a fierce thirst on me and a modest sense of entitlement.’ But under the blarney I was wondering what a senior detective really thought of a man who’d just profited from an illegal fist-fight, and why on earth he would want of all things to buy that man a drink.
It was close to midnight by now and the pubs in this more affluent section of the city were less crowded than they tended to be in the East End. We had reached Clerkenwell, where people find their homes tolerable places in which to sit and read and converse rather than dank slums fit only for escaping in search of the anesthetic of strong drink. We found Anderson’s establishment of choice and sat in the snug at a table close to a coke fire and without eavesdropping neighbours.
‘Am I right in thinking you recently returned to Europe from America?’ Anderson asked.
‘I think you know you are,’ I answered, after a measured sip of porter. He’d told only the truth about that. My thirst would have flattered any brew but this was excellent.
‘Where you were first trained and then employed for three years by the Pinkerton Detective Agency?’
‘For my sins, I was,’ I said.
Father Jeffries said, ‘Did you ever kill a man?’
‘I never had cause to fire a bullet, Father. I pointed my pistol when required and they came quietly. So I never had cause to kill a man directly, though I consigned maybe half a dozen to the end of a rope.’
The distinction seemed a fine one to me, but Father Jeffries seemed encouraged by this answer.
Anderson asked, ‘What were your particular skills?’
‘I was good at detection. But it’s not a skill has a lot of application in frontier towns. Most cattle rustlers and train robbers leave plenty of clues as to who it is has done the stealing. The same is true of shootings. Tracking was my particular skill. I had a natural aptitude for that.’
‘And you were very successful,’ Anderson said. ‘So why did you stop?’
I thought about deflecting him with some platitude, but he had an honest face and a clear-eyed sincerity about him that compelled me to tell him the truth. I said, ‘I had a feeling that my luck was running out. I’d faced down men lightning-quick on the draw with a Colt. I’d come out of ambushes completely unscathed. I’d eluded hostile natives, survived stampeding cattle, never caught the clap and avoided the consumption. Nothing unfortunate ever came my way. Not so much as a nick from a razor being shaved in a barber’s chair. I just woke up one morning in a Kansas City hotel eight months ago knowing I’d tempted fate far enough.’
‘You’re the seventh son of a seventh son,’ Father Jeffries said. ‘They’re said to be people of exceptional good fortune.’
‘You two fellows seem to know an awful lot about me,’ I said. ‘Would it be rude to ask how and, more particularly, why?’
‘We want your help in a scheme,’ Anderson said.
I sipped porter. I said, ‘I’m surprised you’ve the time for schemes. You’ve got four murdered women on your hands and a killer fast developing a relish for his work.’
‘It’s rather more than four,’ Anderson said.
‘How many is rather more?’
‘He’s slaughtered eight. Two of them were titled women. He killed Lady An
nabel Lamb a week ago. A fortnight ago he killed the Duchess of Oxenbury.’
I’d read about those deaths in the newspaper. Lady Lamb had been hit, the story said, at a railway crossing by a locomotive. The duchess had died in an accident when she had slipped from the stern of a boat and been caught in the propeller.
Anderson looked at me, reading my thoughts. He said, ‘It was the only way to rationalize the injuries. We’re having to censor him. He leaves messages at the scenes. We obliterate them the second we arrive. Things have got hot enough for the Jews and the freemasons without those boasts and accusations and threats he daubs becoming public knowledge.’
‘Yet you’re telling me.’
‘If you’re going to help us with our scheme, we have to trust each other,’ he said.
I said, ‘Tell me about your scheme.’
Anderson took a notebook from his coat pocket. It had a leather cover and a sleeve sewn into its side from which he took a silver propelling pencil. ‘I’m going to write down the name of a man and his description,’ he said. ‘This fellow eats, drinks, defecates and breaths. He wears a scent he has concocted by a Bloomsbury pharmacy. He has suits tailored for him in Soho. He enjoys gambling and music hall.’
‘That’s all commendably thorough. What am I supposed to do with the information?’
‘He’s disappeared. We want you to find him. If and when you find him, we’d like you to challenge him to a bout of fisticuffs. He won’t be able to turn down the challenge or the wager.’
‘He’s unbearably vain,’ Father Jeffries said. ‘He can’t resist a bet.’
‘He’s a liar and a cheat,’ Anderson said.
‘He’s a prince among liars and cheats,’ Jeffries said. ‘But he’s not just devious. He’s strong. He’ll be a formidable opponent.’
‘Then why would I wish to fight him?’
‘For the purse,’ Anderson said. ‘Beat him and we’ll pay you twenty thousand pounds in gold. You’ll never unload another cargo hold as long as you live.’
‘You can muster candidates younger and stronger than me,’ I said.
‘But none so lucky,’ Jefferies said.
He’d gone pale. They both had. The porter wasn’t having the effect of providing them with the fortitude to discuss the fellow they wanted me to fight. There was more to it. They were not weak men I was seated with. They did not, either of them, naturally lack gumption.
‘I’ll go to the bar and fetch us a whisky apiece,’ I said. ‘To celebrate a bargain struck,’ and to put some colour back in my companions’ cheeks. I stood fishing in my pocket for change and tilted my head to read the name at the top of the description torn by Anderson from his notebook and placed on our table. It read, Edmund Caul.
I left them with much on my walk back to Devil’s Acre to think about. I knew how it was they knew so much about me. In June I was arrested following an affray in a Lambeth High Street pub. I had not been in Lambeth, never mind in the pub when this event occurred.
I was taken into custody, questioned and after a few hours of confinement, released. They were magnanimous enough, the fellows in blue gabardine, to make me a mug of tea before my departure. They’d known I was innocent. They’d been compiling a file on me was all and Anderson and his priestly friend had since then studied it.
October 20th 1888
Almost three weeks and I haven’t yet located Edmund Caul. London lies in the gloomy embrace of fear and suspicion. The carts and wagons trundle through its teeming thoroughfares and the rough cries of the street peddlers and toughs and costermongers and the rag and bone men chorus and compete shrilly. But there is a sombre End of Days atmosphere about the metropolis and when the smog’s suffocating mantle descends it seems in the lost faces and listless souls of its denizens that the darkness might never lift.
The death of the prison reformer and philanthropist Edith Cecil was reported in the papers yesterday. She was attacked and mauled to death on Hampstead Heath by a pack of wild dogs. It was her custom to enjoy a constitutional in the clean air of the Heath’s high pastures.
I never knew it was so hazardous a locale. It was a very unfortunate way for a woman so noble and good to meet her demise. I wonder how the next high-born victim of the killer will likely die. Perhaps a lion or a tiger will escape from its secure berth at the zoological gardens intent on a genteel dinner.
Caul cannot be their man. They would not suggest something as frivolous as a fist-fight with the butcher responsible now for the deaths of nine unfortunates. He would be bound in irons, tried before an Old Bailey judge and dispatched without regret or hesitation to the gallows. He’d surely be for the jump.
And there is the purse. It is out of all proportion to the actuality of the match. Yesterday one of Anderson’s men called and gave me the keys to an address in Hercules Road in Lambeth. It was done very precisely by one of those new typewriting machines on a card tied to the key ring. I walked over Westminster Bridge to get to the spot, the heave of the river beneath my feet turgid and stinking and the lamps lit as a cheery riposte to the general dank demeanor of the day.
My destination was built into one of the railway arches under the lines that terminate at Waterloo Station. I opened a double-mortised and sturdily padlocked iron door and within discovered a chamber with a curved roof and no furnishing beyond a full-size boxing ring. Lamps had been rigged above the ring and supplied, I saw from the arrangement of pipes, with gas. The solder on the pipe joins glimmered in the light from the open doorway behind me. The work was very recently done.
This is the venue for the bout they wish me to contest. There is to be no master of ceremonies, no referee, no seconds, no time-keeper and not a solitary spectator present. I stood there thinking the scene both curious and sobering. I was intrigued by the mysterious purpose of the whole enterprise. At a time of public uneasiness and palpable distrust, it struck me on the part of its architects wholly as folly.
There was a six-minute clock on the wall. These contraptions have a face segmented into six sections, five being marked in white and the sixth in red. A single hand circulates. When after five minutes it reaches the red section, a bell sounds to signal the end of the round. After a minute’s rest it sounds again to signal the start of the next session. It wasn’t wound; the hand was idle. It would be for me or Edmund Caul to wind it.
There were buckets and stools in opposing corners of the ring and a tap protruding from the wall to my left above a grid released clean water when I turned it on. Trouble has been gone to. Thought and effort and money have gone into this. They have thought of everything but the single crucial detail of a sensible purpose for it all.
The place impended. That was what it did. It possessed the atmosphere of something significant shortly to happen. A train trundled on one of the tracks laid over the stone arch above me and through suffocating masonry I heard the faint sigh of its engine’s whistle. And I had the first inkling that my match with Caul might not be folly at all but important in some deadly way I had neither the knowledge nor capacity to grasp.
After my visit to the archway I walked back across the bridge. The steamboats are a mighty sight with their puffing funnels and churning circular paddles but the stink of the water they float on is so fetid it doesn’t do to linger for a moment longer than necessary in a crossing on foot. I walked to the Strand and queued at a coffee stall and drank the bitter brew pondering that I might have been looking for Caul in the wrong places.
A man who wears a cologne of his own devising might be said to be refined. The same is true of a man who wears bespoke suits. But any callous thug can affect gentlemanly pretensions. What if this gambler doesn’t frequent the casinos and card schools as often as he does the cock or fighting dog pit? What if blood and mutilation are attractive aspects of the way he likes to place his wagers?
Steam rose from the stall’s boiling water urn. Customers sipped their rejuvenating beverages from the stall’s little tin cups. The sky brooded above, rain threatening and
most of the coffee drinkers clad in ulsters or waterproof capes. There was the murmur of conversation, subdued and guarded as has become characteristic of London since the killer they’re calling the Ripper began his spree.
The rumours are rife. It’s the Queen’s surgeon. It’s Victoria’s simpleton grandson, Prince Albert Victor. It’s a soldier gone mad campaigning in Afghanistan or a Tory Peer driven insane by syphilis.
But overwhelmingly it’s a foreigner and more than likely it’s a foreign Jew. He’ll be a Pole or a Russian. He’s certain to be a German or a Greek. He’s an abortionist from Paris, you mark my words. He’s a Sicilian pork butcher runs a shop in Clerkenwell Road and worships every Sunday at the Catholic church there. He’s a rich stockbroker who strikes with impunity, protected by his cabal of masonic friends. Except that he’s none of these because he’s a demon in human guise wearing the refinement of a gentleman’s clothes.
If they knew the true number and identity of the victims I think there would be more on the streets than Vigilance Committee members armed with swordsticks and revolvers. The police would be seen as powerless to protect the populace. The mob would rise and London would become ungovernable.
There’s a dog fight every Friday night staged at a dive in Bethnal Green. I know because a fellow from Limerick who breeds bull mastiffs told me about it when the two of us were working together on Limehouse Docks. That was before the killings and the work drying up for foreigners like me and him on account of them.
I’ve one pound ten shillings of the money left I won when I beat the Boilerhouse. Today is Thursday. I’m going to go to Bethnal Green tomorrow and see if I can’t sniff out a well-dressed fellow wearing on him a whiff of lavender water and camphor oil.
