My bedroom door never was kicked in that Sunday night on the last day of September. Neither my husband nor Dr Shivershev came thundering into the house baying for my blood. And so, eventually, I fell asleep.
But, next morning, there was news.
YET MORE WHITECHAPEL ATROCITIES WOMAN MURDERED NEAR COMMERCIAL ROAD WOMAN MURDERED IN ALDGATE THROATS CUT AND FACE SLASHED
1 October 1888
Two more women were found slain in London yesterday morning. The corpse of Elizabeth Stride was discovered in Berner Street, Whitechapel, with her head nearly severed from her body. Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square in Aldgate, in the City. Her throat had been cut and her body mutilated in the most hideous way.
The gruesome injuries found on the past victims in this tragic series were almost exactly played out with these two new unfortunates. Both victims were known to be night wanderers and of a certain class.
The murderer, who it seems is the same, lone lunatic, grows bolder with each crime. With unnerving precision, he slaughtered two in the same hour, under the night sky, his chosen charnel-house.
No more is known at this time, and there is every likelihood no more will ever be known. It is impossible to avoid the depressing conclusion that the police will fail to find the murderer of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, as they have failed for Annie Chapman, Mary Ann Nichols, Martha Tabram and Emma Smith.
The most agonising of the East End mysteries is the incompetent paralysis of the police, who flounder while the most vulnerable inhabitants of the East End must continue to live in fear.
I could not deny that this ‘double event’, as the newspapers were calling it, had me enthralled, just as its gruesome precedents had. Reading the stories that Monday was a welcome distraction from my own troubles – or at least I allowed myself to see it as a distraction, despite the concerns about the increasingly bizarre situation I found myself in. I sent Sarah out at two-hourly intervals, bidding her come back with the new editions, and I took up residence in the back dining room, devouring the reports, clipping out the columns and pasting them into my scrapbook.
Sarah also returned with snippets of gossip overheard at the newsstands. Ladies who had, like me, enjoyed their perverse slumming tours were now feeling rather differently, since the killer had moved beyond the East End and into the City. What an outrage! Sympathy for Long Liz and Kate appeared to be muted: to the comfortable of the west, these two latest victims morphed into a single composite image of a wretched, self-destructive, alcoholic whore, defined only by her fecklessness, poverty and diseases. This ‘other’ woman, this creature who must live at the bottom and stay there so they could keep their rightful place above, had begun to encroach into their territory.
To return some dignity to Long Liz – or ‘Elizabeth the Melody’, as I came to see her – and to my sparrow-like Kate of want and plenty, I took up my notebook again. I had plenty of material. There were acres of newsprint on the poor women, and out of them I fashioned my own dramas, as I had with Little Lost Polly and Dark Annie. I wanted in my own way to accompany them through their last evening on this earth, grimy and lacking though it surely must have been. Who knew how long it would be before I joined their ranks.
On the Berner Street yard where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found there was a club that was popular with socialists, political radicals and Jews. The evening of her murder, there’d been a debate on why all Jews should be socialists, and afterwards people had stayed on, singing and dancing late into the night. It was they who’d found Liz, flat on her back with her throat cut, lying in a slimy pool of congealing blood. The police treated every male among them as a suspect. They tore the club apart, even had the men stand in line so their hands could be examined for bloodstains. They banged on every nearby door, woke the sweatshop workers, cigarette makers and tailors and searched their houses too, accusing them of harbouring the murderer. This went on until five in the morning, by which time news had spread that a second body had been found a mile away.
It was as if the killer had been disturbed on the first kill, and was so enraged, he determined to find another at all costs. Poor Kate Eddowes took full force; he slashed her throat, made a huge gash across her right cheek which severed the tip of her nose and part of her right earlobe – these tumbled out of her clothes when they were removed at the morgue – sliced her open from rectum to breastbone, and disembowelled her in a frenzy, pulling her entrails from her, tossing them over her shoulder and leaving them in a jellied heap on the pavement.
By late evening, Sarah was bringing back tales of a surge in the heckling and goading of Jews on the streets, and even some attacks. Mobs had been heard chanting ‘Down with the Jews’. I wondered how Dr Shivershev would feel about that, if a privileged and educated Jewish man like him would feel the same fear as the sweated Jew on the street must, or if like us women, Jews relied on there being a lesser kind of themselves to play the scapegoat. The police were clearly no closer to finding the perpetrator and one of the letters pages printed a solution that had me in fits of giggles: The police should be given noiseless boots so they can sneak up on the Whitechapel fellow.
The real breakthrough came when an eyewitness emerged. Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew, had been walking down Berner Street at around the time Liz Stride was presumed to have been murdered. I pored over the descriptions, read them again and again, pictured Israel Schwartz in all his terror and wrote him into my little drama to try and fathom it better. Though Schwartz reported what he saw the police, the public called him a ‘hen-hearted coward’, for not intervening. I thought that a harsh judgement, what men stopped other men from beating their wives? No one called them cowards. Schwartz said he’d seen a man and a woman having an argument – the man being of medium height and broad shouldered and with dark hair, a full face and a small moustache. And there was a second man too – tall, at around five foot eleven, with brown hair, a moustache and a dark overcoat. There was no getting away from it: when I read these words, I saw Thomas and Dr Shivershev.
*
When Thomas eventually came home that evening, I waited for the truth to come out, but there was nothing. No explosion of outrage from him about the details of all that I’d shared, in confidence, with Dr Shivershev. No admission, even, that he’d met with Dr Shivershev. The uncertainty and disingenuousness was driving me insane. I was convinced I had seen the two of them together in the Princess Alice and yet now I doubted myself. I wondered why I continued with my inaction, when everything, every clue and warning, was telling me to run. What was I waiting for?
The reality was, I still thought my fate unchangeable, as I always had. I had made plays at a career as a nurse, and then as a wife, but I carried the fear that I had no real place as either. I had to assume this was why I had found both so difficult to make successful. I had whipped up an ambition that didn’t belong to me, forced my way into a profession I didn’t suit and found a husband that shouldn’t be mine. I had set out consciously to trap someone I thought I could manage and now I was the fool who was trapped. All I could do was wait, resigned to the inevitable end.
This was a story with an ending that had been written long ago. I had merely managed to defer it the first time. I somehow knew all along that I would meet my end at the hands of a violent man. Why else would the man with the gold tooth keep visiting me in my dreams? There was no point running, because wherever I went, I carried him with me.
The man with the gold tooth had at one point merely been one of the many men in my mother’s bed. I would hide under the bed in our room in the Nichol when he came to visit, as I did with all of them.
That night, I’d kept quiet as a mouse, as I’d been taught, even as the bed shook with my mother and the man above me. At first the noises had made sense – the rhythm, the business of fucking – but then my mother started to make strange gaspings and gurglings, and the bed jumped and bowed, almost touching my face. I lay there willing the floor to swallow me up.
My mother’s white foot twitched in the way I’d seen a chicken twitch when its neck was broken. I was five years old and more scared than I’d ever been. I wet myself. The piss began trickling down my leg, but, young as I was, I knew I mustn’t let it pool on the floor and betray me. The man must not find out that I was there. I stuffed my fingers under my skirt, tried to stem the flow. But it came out anyway, hit the heel of the man’s boot and flowed around it like syrup.
I was frozen, stiff as a board, when the man bent down to see where the water was coming from. His head was as big as a bear’s and the skin of his face was all jowly, like an upside-down bloodhound. There was a black beard and a pair of red, swollen eyes with bright blue circles. He grinned at me, showed me his gold tooth, and left.
My mother’s foot hung over the side of the bed. For two days I watched as it turned from white to purple as the blood settled. I was meant to die in that room, but I didn’t because the landlord came to collect his rent. Pure chance.