WHITE’S ROW, EAST LONDON
NOVEMBER 9
2:45 A.M.

N 1888, MILLER’S COURT WAS A DARK OFFSHOOT OF Dorset Street, known as “the worst street in London.” Room thirteen, at 26 Dorset Street, had its own entrance on Miller’s Court. Room thirteen wasn’t even a real room—it was just an old back parlor cut off by a thin partition, twelve feet square, with a broken window. Inside, there was a bed, a table, and a fireplace. It was here that, on the morning of November 9, 1888, the body of Mary Kelly was discovered. She was found by her landlord, who came by at ten forty-five to collect the rent. It was the only time the Ripper struck indoors and the only time the crime scene was photographed. The hideous images of Mary Kelly in room thirteen entered the annals of history.

Dorset Street was so irredeemable that in the 1920s, the buildings were all demolished to make room for the new fruit market being opened in Spitalfields. On the exact spot where room thirteen once stood, there was now a warehouse where trucks could deliver goods for the market. And at two A.M. on this November 9, over five thousand people had gathered there. They filled the narrow passage between the warehouse and the multistory car park and spilled out onto the streets around. Most of those people had come for an all-night vigil to honor all the Ripper’s victims, both from 1888 and the present.

But there were other people there as well. There were dozens of news reporters babbling on to rolling cameras in dozens of different languages. There were dozens of police officers, uniformed and plainclothed, wandering the crowd. There were souvenir carts selling WELCOME BACK, JACK and I SURVIVED NOVEMBER 9TH AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS BLOODY T-SHIRT (complete with fake bloodstain) shirts. There were food and drink vendors selling hot chestnuts, sodas, tea, sausage rolls, and ice cream. In many ways, it looked like a carnival.

No one noticed who started passing out the flyers. They just started circulating through the crowd and were passed on automatically. They contained six words only—no call to action, no instructions. Just a strange, simple message.

Several minutes later, to bring the point home, a flood of flyers drifted from the sky. The drizzle dampened them and made them heavy and sticky, so some adhered to the walls as they came down. The crowd looked up at the multistory car park behind them. The flyers were still falling, but there was no one throwing them. They came and they came, handfuls at a time.

One of the vigil organizers peeled a flyer off the wall and read it.

“What is this?” she asked. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

Because the car park was sitting more or less on the site of the fifth Ripper murder, it had been closed and locked down for the night. Several police officers patrolled the ground floor. No one could have gotten to the top. And yet that was where the flyers were coming from. There was a lot of talking into shoulder radios, and a team ran up to scout every level and find whoever was up there. Two more police officers were in the car park office, looking at the CCTV camera screens in confusion. They could see the flyers going out, but couldn’t see the person tossing them. The reports were coming in: “Level one, clear.” “Level two, clear.”

Down in the street, the reporters stared up at the shower of paper. The cameras turned upward to get the shot. At least it was different, something to break up the monotony of waiting for this thing to happen, the endless newscaster drivel and footage of police cars cruising along.

Only one person in the crowd saw who was throwing the flyers. That person was seventeen-year-old Jessie Johnson, who, three days before, had gone into anaphylactic shock after eating a peanut. She saw the woman in the 1940s army uniform leaning over from one of the levels, tossing the papers into the air.

“She’s there,” Jessie said. “Right there.”

Jessie’s observations were lost in the mayhem as a helicopter appeared low overhead, drowning out everything with the sound of chopper blades and blinding everyone with its powerful searchlight. It scanned the top of the car park while the people below shielded their eyes and their candles and tried to continue with the vigil.

“We will never forget,” the person at the microphone yelled, “that the victims have names, have faces … We will take this night back …”

Jessie watched as the woman in the uniform finished throwing the flyers and disappeared. A few minutes later, she walked briskly out of the car park, right past three police officers. Even as it was happening, Jessie was rewriting the story in her mind. It was too odd. The woman must have been a police officer or something like that. She had no idea that she had just seen the British army’s last active soldier from the Second World War, still in her uniform, still defending the East End.

Jessie looked down at the flyers, which coated the street and were being read by thousands of people and filmed by dozens of television cameras. They read

 

THE EYES WILL COME TO YOU