It was Sarah who woke me from my screaming by banging at my locked bedroom door.
I had been lying on the floor of a coach. I must have fallen asleep there, or maybe Thomas had hit me too hard and I’d passed out. I didn’t panic, not like I had that first time when Thomas squeezed my neck until I lost consciousness. I was fairly used to it now. I could feel that the blood had dried on my face. I brushed off the flakes with my fingers and prodded the new scab on my swollen lip.
I was looking at the ceiling of a coach; its walls were black. It was still dark outside. We rolled over a particularly bumpy stretch of road and when I put both hands up against the bottom of the seats to steady myself I realised Thomas wasn’t there any more. He had left me in the coach on my own. But where was I going?
I sat up and stared out at the navy-blue skies and black branches like crooked fingers. I was being driven out of London, but to where? I pulled myself on to my knees as the coach picked up speed over the rough ground. These were country roads, not city streets. The coach was being thrown from side to side and I struggled to stay upright. The driver was obviously a reckless fool. I had to make him take me back home to Chelsea. I reached up and thumped the ceiling with my balled fist. There was a thump back.
‘Hello!’ I shouted, but there was no answer.
Thomas’s head appeared, upside down at the open coach window, grinning at me, his face livid, his cheeks slack and his blue eyes bloodshot. His hair was long and ungroomed and he held his hat on his head. When he grinned, there was a gold tooth. I screamed. How could I not have seen that before? How could I have missed it?
I screamed myself awake, and heard Sarah hammering at my bedroom door.
‘Missus! Missus! Let me in! What’s going on? Are you hurt?’ she shouted as she rattled the handle. ‘Shall I fetch Mrs Wiggs? Oh, what shall I do?’
She sounded like Mabel. I told her to go away, but she wouldn’t. So I let her in.
‘I was having a nightmare, that’s all. I’m quite all right. What time is it anyway?’ I asked.
‘It’s gone eleven, missus.’
I hadn’t had the chance to look at my face yet, although it was tender, but to her credit Sarah didn’t give anything away. I wondered if domestics received lessons in such things: how to maintain an expressionless face when confronted by the awkward evidence of violence. They used to tell us nurses that when delivering bad news we should be truthful, brief and gone, but to leave out gruesome detail. For example, when a patient had died on the operating table, we were told not to say, ‘He died in agony, half of his leg off,’ but rather, ‘The end came mercifully quickly.’
I sent Sarah away to get the papers once I’d reassured her I wasn’t dying and there was no need for a doctor, and certainly no need for Mrs Wiggs. When she came back and gave me the Telegraph, I nearly took to my bed again.
FOURTH WHITECHAPEL WOMAN MUTILATED
Yet another brutal murder was committed in the Whitechapel area this morning. This is the fourth woman to have been stabbed and mutilated, in circumstances strikingly similar to the others. She was attacked in the same way as Polly Nichols and there is little doubt she too was of the unfortunate class.
At six o’clock this morning she was found lying on her back in the yard of 29 Hanbury Street. This is a respectable street, but it is only a short distance from Spitalfields Working Men’s Club. Number 29 is let to tenants of the working class.
DISEMBOWELLED
Dr Phillips, the Divisional Surgeon of Police, found that the woman’s throat had been cut nearly to the vertebrae and that she had been entirely disembowelled. Her intestines lay next to her. She was removed to the mortuary.
While not yet officially identified, it is thought that she was known as Sievey and that her real name may have been Annie Chapman. She was last seen drinking with a man at the Ten Bells, five minutes’ walk from the spot where her corpse was found.
She had lodged at 35 Dorset Street, Spitalfields, on and off for the past eight or nine months, but last night she was unable to pay for her lodging. Recently she was an inmate of the Whitechapel Workhouse, making use of the casual ward.
EXCITEMENT IN WHITECHAPEL
The excitement in Whitechapel is high.
The discovery of this body so soon after the others has paralysed the district with fear. All business in the vicinity of the scene has been stopped and the streets swarmed with people this morning. Many stood about in groups, discussing the murders, and there is a firm opinion that all the murders were committed by the same person. The police have thus far failed to bring anyone to justice and are still hunting for the man they call ‘Leather Apron’.
He is clearly a madman with uncontrollable homicidal urges. It is widely accepted that lunatics are often more devious and cunning than any sane man. While this murderer is at large, no one in Whitechapel is safe.
‘No Englishman could have done this’ was the phrase quoted widely in all the papers. Groups of feral youths were reported to be harassing local Jewish men, trying to bait them into fights, and Jewish families were getting heckled outside their shops and homes. Groups were being followed home from synagogues.
The police found bloodstains and a piece of water-saturated leather apron in the yard. Annie’s meagre possessions had been scattered about nearby: a pocket of her underskirt had been cut away; a piece of muslin, a comb and paper case lay near her body; and a brass wedding ring and its keeper had been torn from her fingers but left on the ground. An envelope containing two pills had been carefully placed by her head, as if left intentionally by Leather Apron as his calling card. If only the inept police could find this man, the papers screeched, the murders would stop.
I seemed to be the only person in London who felt differently. When I read the descriptions of how Dark Annie was found, I saw Thomas’s face as it hung down above me in a bloody rage while I lay on the coach floor; I saw its twin apparition from my nightmares. Where did he go after he left me and drove off in that cab? Where could he have gone? It was too much of a coincidence now: scratches after Martha, coming home covered in blood after Polly and now this. He would have had ample opportunity to murder Annie. Was he thinking of me when he cut her throat? I took to my drops, if only to steady my nerves.
Witnesses emerged. A woman said she’d been harassed in the Queen’s Head in Spitalfields by a man fitting the description of Leather Apron. ‘You’re about the same style of woman as the ones that have been murdered,’ he’d leered at her. Given that the murdered women were all prostitutes, that warranted a slap round the face, but instead she’d merely asked what he meant. To which he’d replied, ‘You’re beginning to smell a rat. Foxes hunt geese, but they don’t always find ’em.’ A weird conversation, but the papers loved it, and the woman enjoyed her moment of fame.
Dark Annie stuck with me, and I spent a lot of hours – whole days – thinking about her, imagining her last evening, filling more pages of my scrapbook with my notes. There were things about her that sliced at me, things that were a little too familiar for me to undertake my macabre observation without guilt. For a start there was her name. ‘Chapman’ was also my mother’s name, and Dark Annie’s story could easily have been my mother’s, if only she’d had the chance to get to forty-two. Like Dark Annie, my mother was a gentle type, quietly spoken, and chose her words carefully. Those were the qualities I remembered.
It seemed all the more tragic the way the papers wrote about Dark Annie as if she was an ailing, listless vagrant. Yet it was clear she wasn’t always that way. Little details came through, such as the fact she sometimes sold flowers or crochet, and she was known for her love of rum. She lived with a sieve maker, which gave her the nickname: Dark Annie Sievey. She was stout with a thick nose and missing teeth. By all accounts, none of the woman had been considered attractive, even by the standards of the labouring poor.
More details were released, ever so gradually so as to keep us in a perpetual state of quivering horror. Her uterus, the upper portion of her vagina, and the posterior two thirds of her bladder had been removed. As this was done so quickly, the murderer would need to have had knowledge of pathological or anatomical examinations. According to the coroner, the killer had half strangled her to the ground, rendering her voiceless, and then cut her throat. It was blood loss that caused her death.
At the inquest, the piece of leather apron was dismissed as irrelevant – a bitter disappointment, as it had made such good theatre. It was found to have belonged to the son of a tenant.
If there had been hysteria over the murders before, then after this one it went wild. The murders were headline news as far as New York, Montreal, and all over Europe. When they weren’t printing fantastical witness accounts, speculative theories or letters from moralists, the press dedicated column inches to savaging the police. Even the coroner joined in, complaining he had not been given a map to show where or how the last body was found. The general consensus was that the police were stupid, plodding clowns.
At the morgue, Annie’s body had been stripped and washed down by inmates of the workhouse and her clothes dumped in the corner, ruining any evidence. The police surgeon protested that he could not work in such terrible conditions, it being an outrage that Whitechapel didn’t even have its own morgue. The police were overwhelmed and had few resources. They had to rely on word of mouth, and there were a lot of flapping mouths in the East End. A group of local tradesmen started their own organisation in frustration. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee duly issued a notice stating they would offer a substantial reward for any information that led to the arrest of the murderer. An MP put up £500. As a result, the police were bombarded with even more witnesses, letters, confessions, hoaxes and ever-helpful theorists.
Moralists and commentators posed some difficult questions. Surely the poverty and depravity suffered by the innocents of the East End were a matter of public responsibility? If the lawless, morally corrupt and dangerous conditions there created killers such as Leather Apron, who would address them?
On Monday the tenth of September, Leather Apron was found, hiding in a house on Mulberry Street. His real name was John Pizer. The police discovered several long blades in the house, which Pizer said were for his work as a boot finisher. He protested his innocence but was taken, along with those who had hidden him, to Leman Street Police Station.
It came as a surprise to find myself deflated, disappointed even. Was that it? If it was Pizer, then that meant I was to be stuck with the man I had married. I think I had rather hoped the police would knock on the door one day and take him away, solving my problems. Still, I had to take comfort that it was my wild imagination making Thomas capable of such horrific acts. Of course that was absurd. It was the drops. I needed to cut down on them; they were sending my thoughts racing, making my dreams surreal. I had to accept the humiliating truth that Thomas’s hatred and anger were apparently only for me. But if he wasn’t out murdering women, what he was up to?
Even so, I needed to know conclusively that this John Pizer was the murderer. I scoured the countless inches of cheap hearsay and unfounded opinion filling the columns of every newspaper known to womankind, but there were gaping holes all over the place. Often I became so frustrated, I almost tore the papers in pieces. I considered writing my own version of the story of Leather Apron. Putting him into the picture alongside Little Lost Polly and Dark Annie in an attempt to understand more about him, try and fathom his motives but I couldn’t find enough about him to conjure up anything worth writing down. I could not understand such a man. What struck me was that I had not felt this lack of understanding when it came to the victims, and that filled me with fear. Why was it so easy for me to imagine their lives, had I not moved far enough away from that fate, was my writing hobby a danger? A way of pulling me back to the fate I had escaped.
The city waited with bated breath for the confession, but then all of a sudden Pizer was released without charge. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t him! Leather Apron was not the Whitechapel murderer, though everyone – the papers, the people, and myself – had assumed his guilt was a certainty. But John Pizer’s alibis stood up. He was a rogue; that was not in doubt. He was an altogether nasty person, and a quite horrible and violent bully of women. But they couldn’t imprison him for that. If they had, they’d have had to lock up half of London, and most of Westminster.
I had resigned myself to the fact that the monster had been caught and had laughed at my ridiculous suspicions about Thomas, but now that was all possible again. I felt a twinge of satisfaction that my instincts could be correct, but it was difficult to find solace in being right when I was petrified of what I might be right about. I had not seen Thomas since the night of our argument and Annie Chapman’s murder, and that was some days ago now.
I found myself back at the beginning, with no answers at all, no clue as to where my husband was or with whom, and dreading him walking through the door.