I, Ripper

And all the time I was preening, feeling so brilliant, clever Jack was engineering a carefully wrought scheme: He had to make sure she was alone and asleep, which, it seemed to me, would have involved a careful observation of the site. It’s true she helped him considerably, according to neighbors, by singing until she passed out, alerting any watcher that she was in her dreams and alerting Jack that he had free passage, but again, that information was available only to a careful watcher. It showed all the attributes of the well-planned military mission. Then there was the fact that a few nights before the crime, a barkeep at the Ten Bells named Brian Murphy had been coshed to death on his way home late. Most of the coppers dismissed it as just another robbery crime, maybe pulled off by the High Rips or the Bessarabians, who may have been in cahoots with Murphy, but it was odd that he was known to be conversant with the girls. Could that have had anything at all to … Well, it mucked up considerations and clarity, so I tended to dismiss it, so as to concentrate on the play we had before us still.

The truth is, we should have gone with Colonel Woodruff. He was, after all, the better possibility, assuming the professor’s analysis to be correct (I still believed in it and him). I could not but think of a scene in which we smashed out the window as the colonel was about to strike and, seeing the Howdah, knowing the jig to be up, he threw himself toward us and, without thinking, I double-blasted him to hell. Yes, Mary Jane would be alive, yes, Professor Dare’s genius would be proclaimed, but more to the selfish point, I would be the hero and have whatever it was I desired and be the success I believed myself, having achieved my destiny. No, no, all gone, and as I thought about our choice, I realized it was I who had pressed for the major instead of the colonel, on grounds that the theft of Annie Chapman’s rings suggested a material aspect the colonel lacked.

I saw that I was wrong! The truth was, I didn’t want it to be the colonel. No one did or could. The long years of service, the VC, the blood spilled by him and from him, all spoke to a kind of nobility, and that such a man could commit such crimes seemed not merely grotesque but in some way an indictment of humanity. It was too dark a message to be acknowledged.

Yet it had to be the colonel!

It just had to!

But how could we know?

It was here that a little bug began to whisper in my ear. Louder, louder, little bug, I need to know more. Well, sayeth yon bug, if it is indeed the colonel, and he is indeed “dyslexic,” as the spelling on the Goulston Street wall suggested under the auspices of Professor Dare’s learned eye, then would his condition not be obvious in his official reports or his own private writings?

If the latter, insisted the bug, the only way to obtain such was to secretly enter his rooms and make a search. But the consequences of such a foray going to disaster were so ominous and humiliating that I knew it to be a gambit I could never bring off. I began to quake even in thinking about it.

The bug had an excellent idea: Contact Penny again and see if it were possible for him to talk the colonel in the War Office into filching for just a bit of something written by the colonel in his own hand. Anything, actually. I needed a few minutes with it to see if there was some weird spelling event where letters drifted this way and that or vowels dropped in unexpectedly, as if for tea, and such and such and such.

I will spare the reader and myself the efforts it took to facilitate such an occurrence. No need to dramatize what is essentially a bureaucratic process that involved two or three meetings, much energetic flattery on my part, some shunting around and dipping up and down. We’ll pass on the details, and the truth is, I’m not sure I’d remember them even if pressed.

Needless to say, it all came about, though not without considerable ramification. I found myself in a pub on the far side of the Thames, trying not to attract suspicion as I awaited my visitor while consuming a ploughman’s lunch and pretending to drink (I actually only gargled) a glass of ale.

He was late, slipped in, seemed nervous and hardly military. Tall, slim fellow, rather handsome, no names involved, he was dressed in civilian finery of the higher aristocratic caste, while I chose to wear the brown suit.

“All right,” he said, “Penny vouches for you and I owe Penny much, even if I don’t care for the Star, particularly its pacifist politics and love of Irish mischief.”

“Sir, I have nothing to do with politics. I’m merely a fellow working out possibilities on this horrid Jack thing.”

“I would hate to believe a man such as Colonel Woodruff were involved. He served the crown with fidelity and courage for thirty-five years.”