The Art of Murder (27 page)

A few minutes later, as he was halfway through the
collection of volumes, Sergeant Mackleby emerged from the bathroom. ‘Nothing in there,’ she said. Then stopped at the door to the kitchen. ‘What exactly is it that we’re looking for?’

‘Not sure myself, to be honest,’ he replied. ‘But I’ll know it when I see it.’

‘That’s a great help,’ Roz retorted, and walked into the tiny kitchen.

Jez finished with the books, having found nothing. On the floor were pots of paint and containers sprouting dirty brushes. In one corner lay a rolled-up, paint-splashed sheet, and next to that a pile of old newspapers. Turner went through each pot, lifting the brushes clear of the cleaning fluid. He then emptied the liquid into a spare container, watching the oily paint residue swirl and form a filthy grey-brown mess. The containers concealed no secrets.

He walked over to the window. The tatty curtains were pulled back. He could see flakes of snow drift down, brush the window and dissolve. The road, the buildings and the sky were the colour of the mixed-paint residue. Then he saw himself and the contents of the room reflected in the glass. Beside his right leg, a canvas about two feet square was propped up against the side of the easel with its back to the window. Turner noticed that this one was stretched over a delicate wooden frame. He crouched down and lifted the painting, swivelled it, studied the back of the frame and ran a finger under the edge of the wood where the canvas wrapped around it. He could just get a finger into the gap. There was nothing there.

He put the frame down and picked up one from the top
layer of the collection leaning against the walls and the bed. He could hear Roz Mackleby in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards and shuffling around cereal packets. It was not until the seventh canvas, just when he was beginning to lose heart, that Turner felt a metal object tucked between a wooden strut and the canvas. He managed to wedge another finger into the gap and pulled the object from where it had been nestling. It was a USB portable drive, smaller than his thumb. He lifted it to the light and read the lettering on one side side: Ciscom.Inc. 4Gb.

‘Yes!’ Turner said and smiled to himself.

‘Okay, here we go,’ said Jez Turner as he tapped at the keyboard in Pendragon’s office. The DCI was leaning over his shoulder, staring intently at the screen. The USB drive opened and informed them that it contained two files: one entitled ‘ms’, the other ‘investigations’. He positioned the mouse over ‘ms’ and double-clicked. ‘Ah, password-restricted, naturally.’

‘But you have the password Thursk used,’ Pendragon said.

‘Yeah, but will it work on these files?’ Turner replied and started to tap in NT0658. The file opened. ‘Very sloppy,’ he tutted.

At the top of the first page, it read:
The Lost Girl: Life in the Demi-Monde
by Noel Thursk. Pendragon glanced at the foot of the page. The document was over fifteen thousand words long.

‘Well, how about that,’ Turner said triumphantly. ‘Thursk had written something after all.’

Pendragon ignored him and scrolled down. The screen became a stream of words. He flicked the mouse and clicked the Print command. ‘Okay, what’s in the other one?’

This file also opened with the same password and a list of dozens of jpegs appeared. They were numbered in ascending order. Turner scrolled down. The last one was number 45.

‘Start at the beginning,’ Pendragon said, and Turner double-clicked the first on the list.

A picture opened on the screen. It was of Kingsley Berrick propped up as the figure in a Magritte painting. Pendragon leaned in and clicked jpeg 002. Noel Thursk’s flattened body draped in the tree appeared. Jpeg 003 showed an equally graphic image of Michael O’Leary.

Turner looked round to Pendragon whose face was close to his, his eyes flicking from side to side as he took in the images on the screen a few inches away. ‘I didn’t think any of the police or forensics pictures had been released to the public,’ he said.

‘They haven’t, Turner.’

Jpeg 004 showed the inside of the warehouse on West India Quay. The next was a close-up of the roller; 006 was a shot of the metal punch.

‘Are these trophies?’ Turner said, his voice icy.

Pendragon pulled himself upright and stood up, arms folded, staring at the screen. ‘No,’ he said as Turner spun round in the chair. ‘They’re something entirely different, Sergeant. And I don’t want a word breathed about this until I’m ready. You got that?’

‘Got it, guv.’

To Mrs Sonia Thomson
16 October 1888

And so, an interlude. I had, I thought, done exceedingly well. There were certainly a few precarious moments, especially on the night of the double murder. I had seen the whites of the policeman’s eyes before I jumped, and for a fleeting moment I half-believed I had reached the end of the road, with my skull crushed against the tunnel wall or my body shattered under the steel wheels of the underground train. But that was not to be. The worst I suffered was a sprained ankle and a few lacerations and bruises.

But I needed rest. And, to be honest, I wanted to observe at my leisure the repercussions from my adventures. For this was all part of the creative process. As I started work on the painting, building upon my experiences and my almost perfect recall, I sniffed the air, so to speak. I sensed and relished the rising panic and animal fear of the dumb herd around me.

The newspapers were full of it, of course, and I too
played my part, offering Archibald suitably sanitised renditions of the slashed bodies. I read with great amusement the inaccuracies and downright fictions concerning what had been dubbed ‘the Whitechapel murders’. There was even a copy-cat murder. A whore named Ann Chapman was dispatched by a rank amateur. I was irritated when I first heard of this, but after a moment’s pause, I realised the truth of the adage that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Then, of course, some of the falsehoods had been initiated by Yours Truly. I was particularly proud of the graffiti I had daubed on the wall close to the body of Elizabeth Stride, and the removal of the kidney, which I had already dug up and used in the preparation of my paints. The message had conveyed a subtle suggestion that the Freemasons might be involved because of the vaguely ritualistic aspect to the murder. It had been another amusing little decoy, just to confuse the Old Bill, as the local ovine community call the noble guardians of the law.

Suspects were rounded up. One unfortunate fellow, a worker in a local abattoir, had the misfortune of being spotted close to the scene of Catherine’s sad demise. He was given the nickname ‘Leather Apron’ because of the garment he wore at work. He was pulled in for questioning and held in the cells for a few days. But he was eventually released because the police had no real evidence with which to present a case.

The police were, by and large, completely
ineffectual, I’m pleased to say. I had chosen my theatre well, had I not, Sonia? After all, who gives a damn about a few repulsive, drunken whores? My work was conducted in a part of London which was, in the eyes of most people, beyond the pale. Wealthy gentlemen may have enjoyed visiting the Stew, dipping their toe into Hell and dipping their wicks into very rough receptacles, but that was merely the natural order of things. My victims were those who had fallen over the edge. If London had been portrayed by Hieronymus Bosch, Whitechapel would have been the lowest level of Hell, a place filled with barrels of pitch and fire and brimstone, the bodies of the useless tossed in at will to melt into the universal pit of nothingness. Why should a judge or a police commissioner, a university don or a bishop, care the slightest what happened there?

Inspector Frederick Abberline was the man at the centre of the investigation. And never a more plodding plodder have I encountered – again, I’m thankful, dear lady, if a little peeved, that I did not have a more interesting and challenging adversary. The police never really had a clue about me, and during the two weeks I spent lying low and painting, they called in for questioning literally dozens of nobodies.

It was at this point that I decided to become a little more playful. I started to write letters to the newspapers and the police. It was in the first of these, written in red ink – yes, I do confess this was a little melodramatic – that I introduced the
nickname that will forever be associated with my work: ‘Jack the Ripper’.

I can say in all honesty that I have no idea where the name came from. It just arrived on the page as I signed the letter to the Central News Agency. It was wonderful fun. I deliberately obfuscated the text, writing in the voice of a rather common, uneducated fellow, but nevertheless a man with a sense of humour. Here and there, I sprinkled the letters with tiny clues, egging on the police, trying to stir up a little fight in them. But to no real avail. The plodders continued to plod.

I spent a lot of time with your good husband during my fortnight’s sabbatical. He was a curious fellow. The better I grew to know him, the more puzzling he became. Most striking was the fact that he was a man of both high and ridiculously low tastes. Now, you may say that many men are thus, but with dear old Archibald, it seemed this dichotomy was rather extreme. On the one hand, he delighted in frequenting the Reform Club and other such bastions of pretension and grandeur. He had high ideals, artistic integrity even. He wanted to make statements, to make his mark, to do something noble and worthy. In short, he had a great desire to encourage people to think; which is a quality I admire. But the corollary of all this well-intentioned public behaviour was the man’s insatiable private lust for the low life. He had a seemingly limitless fascination with the seediest brothels, the worst pubs and drinking clubs. He took
me to some of the most dangerous opium dens in London, places few people even knew existed, run by Chinese gangs – filthy, stinking rat holes close to the docks, where the air was so rank with opium fumes one barely needed to partake of the pipe to become intoxicated.

Together, during a three-night run of the dens in Limehouse, we witnessed two murders. One was a stabbing involving two Chinese dealers who dispatched a man who’d threatened to give them up to the police. The other involved the shooting of a young drugs runner. It was most entertaining. Although, I have to say, the high point of my nocturnal adventures with Archibald was the night he took me to the Mansion of Wonders, a fabulous misnomer if ever I heard one, because the venue was certainly no ‘mansion’ and the exhibits were some way short of ‘wonders’.

The Mansion of Wonders was actually a couple of rooms to the rear of a shop at number 259 Whitechapel Road. Archibald informed me that until just two years before a famous grotesque, Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, was on display there, and that the freak had been forced to sit in the shop window to attract the crowds. He is now in the London Hospital, of course. I’m sure, like most of the genteel classes in England, you have followed the strange man’s story in
The Times
. But even with Merrick gone, there still remained plenty of interesting things to see at the freak show, although they were perhaps not in the same league. On the
evening Archibald took me to the Mansion, we saw the Giantess of the Mountains, a woman no less than eight foot tall. She was more or less in proportion, though everything about her was laughably expanded. Her head was almost twice the size of mine.

In the next room sat the Siamese twins, a couple of elderly gentlemen joined by a six-inch strip of thick pink flesh along their sides. They had apparently been in the freak-show business for almost forty years. After we had enjoyed a good chuckle at the twins, they were taken away and Agatha, the world’s hairiest woman, was brought in. For me, she was the oddest of the collection, because, if one were to ignore the fact that she was covered from head to foot with thick black hair, she was otherwise a normal human being.

Archibald was moved by the sight, I could tell. And I know why. It was the woman’s eyes. They were perfectly shaped, large and dark brown, quite beautiful really. But the thing that must have stirred his emotions was the way those eyes peered out from that horrible globe of hair. They possessed an imploring stillness, an almost noble resignation. Archibald was deeply saddened by the experience whereas I felt a wonderful thrill. The woman’s expression was so similar to that of Fred, the boy I had let drown so many years ago. Looking at Agatha, I felt something close to ecstasy. I wanted to laugh uproariously. It was only a sense of decorum that stopped me. I did not care about the sensibilities of
those around me, but I did not want to draw attention to myself. At least not there and then.

After a while, I grew weary of Archibald’s company and felt I was neglecting my work. I started to stay in my room most evenings as well as throughout the day, venturing out only to post letters from a variety of locations and to buy painting materials. I still went out with Archibald occasionally, and continued to supply him with drawings for the
Clarion
, but my heart was not really in it. I found I was becoming increasingly obsessed with my painting. Then, one evening at the beginning of this month, I suddenly knew it was the right time to move on, to claim my last victim and pass on to the final stage of my work.

It had grown chilly during the past few weeks, and I felt the cold even more because I had recently been closeted indoors for much of the time. I knew exactly where I was headed and who my victim was to be. It took me no more than ten minutes walking at a brisk pace to reach Dorset Street close to Commercial Road. Turning into the street, I checked my watch. It was 2 a.m. and there was not a soul around. Halfway along Dorset Street, I found the archway that leads through to a claustrophobic, cobbled courtyard surrounded by hovels. Mary Kelly, my last chosen victim, I knew to be staying in number thirteen.

It was very dark, the half-moon shrouded by thick cloud. Two narrow windows looked out from number thirteen on to the courtyard, and I could just
make out a faint light behind them. From far off came an assortment of sounds. Close to, I could see that two of the panes of glass in the right-hand window were broken. It was obvious Mary had a man in there, so I kept to the shadows and waited.