CONJUNCTIONS:15 Fall 1990
Paul West
ONE WAY OF ACCOUNTING for Dark Annie Chapman's last hours would be to say that Gull, Netley and Sickert found her at 5:30 in the morning, after many tedious searches throughout the East End, and occupied themselves with her for half an hour. Never had Sickert seen so many dark alleyways or, in the gaslight, so many blanched ruined faces attached to bodies that would not straighten or even move forward. Not even during his own nocturnal rambles had he seen such wastage of the human frame; London slept while these waifs and demons capered about in the half-light, raving or gestured, wrestling one another or trying to advance on hands and knees, vomiting or coughing with feral vigor. He had not known there was that much liquor available, though he did not know that the parade of the lost began soon after eleven o'clock, which was when the dossing houses re-let their unoccupied beds: turn-over time it was called, having however nothing to do with apples. For some reason, the exodus from the dosshouses took place about the same time as the police stations released the drunks, giving them a chance to earn their living, if they were women and not too far gone (what was the point of taking them to court the next day and imposing upon them a fine they could not pay?). So, the bedless and the fourpenceless trudged through the streets at the same time with no chance of getting drunk unless they clicked, and those who were sobering up had to join them. Actually, those in jail received better care than those in a fourpenny bed as, out of some not altogether regimented altruism, the constables and the jailer looked in on their charges whereas the M'Carthys and the Donovans who ran the Crossinghams had a business interest only, intent on warehousing the poor; those who went to jail, however briefly, had entered into an almost religious system whose formulas and rituals remained intact and even evinced a mysterious tenderness for the down and out. As Sickert knew, the clients came from other areas of London and were rarely drunk, whereas the flotsam in the streets was mainly female, few of whom would ever be primly accosted by the venerable William Ewart Gladstone, and taken home with him to be propagandized over scones and tea, or cakes and hot chocolate -- whether he was then Prime Minister or not. The error of their way was what Gladstone propounded to his select few whores, with minimal effect, though he did convert several to a different, more exquisite diet designed, perhaps, at least in his own mind, to sap the voracity of the flesh or stiffen the moral fiber of fallen women. What shook Sickert was the untamed flow of the wretched, seen not, as was usual with him, from ground level, but from something in motion, so that those slouching or loitering in the streets seemed to be marking time or even walking backwards, caught in one of death's mighty rallentandos.
Through the streets they toured, prisoners of The Crusader, and even more so when Netley swung down and went off on foot to look. It was then that Sickert heard the sounds of Gull's mastication as he downed sandwiches and milk, buns and coffee, even a few grapes -- My God, Sickert thought, hoped, all he has to do is eat one of the wrong grapes and this whole expedition goes for naught. I wish, I wish. But Gull, who never spoke, in the dim light retained an expression of ponderous acuity, made no mistake and seemed to have endless funds of patience and an enormous bladder, never once having to leave the cab. He must, Sickert thought, be sitting in such a way that the liquids do not percolate to his bladder but remain trapped above the belt like mountain lakes. If this thing were worth doing at all, it might be better to start at dawn, or an hour before it; Sickert found himself amazed to be thinking so prosaic a thought when their purpose was so foul. Or, and once again his hopeful side flashed through, the chosen woman -- the one with black eye and bruised nose, as yet wholly invisible -- were just going to be yelled at and then discharged from the audience, so to speak. Alas, back came an urgent Netley, who spat a few words at them as he remounted: "Go'a," said with a glottal stop, intending that he had seen Dark Annie wincing along somewhere and would quickly get them to her. At first she refused, glaring at them in fatigue, impatient with everybody and eager to go nowhere, a being wholly unstarched, yeaming for bed and food. Nobody had made any offer for her services, she had no money, no drink, no food, and hardly even her legs; her entire body still ached from the drunken brawl with Liza Cooper, and she was thinking of going back to the casualty ward, just to get herself into a chair. It was that or going to lie down in one of the overgrown yards between the blocks of terrace houses. Once again Sickert had to officiate, this time beginning with more of an argument: "You look weary, my dear, and none too well," hating himself for doing it. "We are all weary tonight, it has been a long journey for us. May we drop you at your convenience? " He was careful to keep the idiom of the patronizing toff out of his address; treat her as a lady, don't say "dearie" or "darling," even when she answered, as she did, saying "Keptin," her version of "Captain."
" Nah, " Annie Chapman said, " I'll walk it, Keptin.
"Honestly, madam, it will be no trouble."
"You not arfter anyfink are you?"
"Only some beauty sleep, madam. Please." He smiled his most ornate smile, knowing that she did not know how this dialogue had gone, only a week ago, with Polly Nichols. He felt sour and despicable, doing it again, but the vision of a dismembered child seized his brain. He offered a hand, a big warm hand, and that did it. In she came, to Gull's gross apology for the lack of wine, a little sitting there among them on the heaped-up muslin, then a grape, her first food this day, even as Gull babbled on about how grapes, currants and raisins sustained him; he was a children's doctor, he said, affiliated with Dr. Bamardo's Home for Working and Destitute Lads, as if he knew about her crippled son. She made no sound other than a sigh, three-quarters unconscious before she even bit the grape, and Gull was at her throat in seconds, mild-mannered but swift as a gorilla, and it all began, the clothes went upward, the knife spun and floated, Gull reached into her and twizzled, then removed some organ and slid it into his pocket all wet. After that, Gull told Sickert to help him to remove Dark Annie's rings, which took some forcing, and Sickert looked at her hands only, imagining himself far away, not doing this at all, but his eyes craved the sight, the butchered belly in the tiny charnel house, the shambles in the gloaming -- for art, for love, for what?
"Dark Annie Chapman," Gull whispered as he took a rest, "sometimes known as Siffey. Friend of Mistress Kelly and Mistress Stride. If only there were time to do another. But look, it will soon be light."
Sickert knew he had not seen it happen, or his head would have exploded. All he could hear, apart from the creaking of the cab and the sound of the horse's hooves, were the last little interjections of both Polly and Dark Annie as they succumbed without quite realizing how grievous it was going to be: Polly Nichols's frail, waning, almost comfy murmur of "Gor blimey, gents" and Dark Annie Chapman's pure, scalded sigh -- "I'm goin'." Somewhere on Hanbury Street, he and Netley lowered her gently to the ground, off her coming an odd aroma of suet and glycerine. She had last been seen going from Dorset Street across Crispin Street to Brushfield Street and she was now only as far away from the dosshouse as she would have been at the far end of Brushfield Street. She had gone nowhere at all all night, in fact retracing her steps in the same vicinity as if ground walked over again and again were somehow less taxing. Netley, however, had seen her leaning against a wall as the brewer's clock chimed the half-hour of 5:30; a dark man in a deerstalker hat was walking away from her, calling back to her "yes" even as she answered "No, no" without waiting for him to finish. In fact, The Crusader had dropped her off where Netley had seen her, as if to be tidy, but in a state of shocking disarray: her hands raised with her palms upward, her legs drawn up with her feet on the ground and her knees aimed outward, on her back, some of her intestines set on her right shoulder. Netley had made this final arrangement while Sickert, heaving, had positioned her rings at her feet along with some pennies and two brand-new farthings that Gull had supplied, muttering something about brass's being the sacred metal of masons. Round her throat Netley had wound a scarf before they lifted her out and down, for Gull had attacked the spine with such ferocity that her head was almost free. This was the very scarf she had been wearing when she had clambered in to join them, her heart faintly uplifted by their show of chivalry.
Again Sickert had blood on him when he entered his studio, shaking and aghast; again he washed it away as best he could, marveling at how fast it changed hue, wondering if she had been found yet and if he had dropped anything at the site. Surely Netley was wrong to visit the same spot twice, as something dropped on the second occasion would matter whereas something dropped elsewhere, everywhere else, would not matter at all. Why the return to the point of origin? Was something luring him on? Afterwards, Gull had sat still with an almost juvenile smile, his hand on whatever it was he had slid into his pocket, as if it were going to be some prodigious exhibit to startle the examiners at Guy's, whose requirements he had long since met and had indeed, in his own right, stiffened for subsequent generations of candidates. A souvenir, then? Sickert shrank from thinking further: he was not going to get away with this, he knew. Best confess. Give himself up now.
But to whom? There was no way of shedding the burden, not if he believed in the malefic power of Gull, no keener demonstration of which he could imagine than what had just gone on in The Crusader. Once again he had not been the victim; indeed, about Gull today there had been something Saturday-afternoonish and bumbling, almost as if he had been on his way back from a rather soothing cricket match in which not much had happened save a whole series of decorous stalemates. For all the ferocity of his attack, the man had been oddly mellow. Sickert told himself he would not go again, but he knew he would have to. Why, Netley himself might do him an injury; his role was far from limited to cruising the streets on foot, and the pubs, the entries, the yards. He too, like Gull, had delusions of being demonic, and they were not delusions altogether, as Sickert was going to find out.
They had dumped Dark Annie less than half a mile from Buck's Row, behind a lodging house that sheltered seventeen souls, five in the attic. On the ground floor was a cat's-meat shop, and on the first floor Mrs. Davis's packing-case business. There was a yard in the rear and, alongside, a passageway that led to the stairs; tarts took their pick-ups to both the yard and the passageway (which had an unlocked door at either end). Dark Annie had gone back to the squalor she came from. Her feet pointed at a small woodshed, her trunk was parallel to the fence, and her head was half a foot short of the bottom step. John Davis, who found her at about six o'clock, had been unable to sleep between three and five, but had then dropped off for half an hour, as was almost usual with him. He had moved in with his mother only a couple of weeks ago and he could not adjust to the racket of the carts outside. He heard the church clock tolling six as he inspected the yard door, which tarts often left open after using the premises, opened it and saw Dark Annie's remains at the bottom of the steps, abandoned-looking on tufts of grass and flagstones. For a moment he tried to go back to sleep, blurred there with his pants belt in his hand, and then he saw several men from the local case-maker's shop, called to them and said to come and look at what was in the yard. They came over, but hung back short of the steps exclaiming and whispering as a crowd began to form and screams began to fill the nearby streets. Finally someone ran to find a constable, and a workman, after taking some brandy from his flask, found a tarpaulin to arrange over the body. They had seen her face already, though, bloody like her upreaching hands, and the long black coat shoved up over the bloodstained stockings. Her left arm was on her left breast, set there by Netley on Gull's instruction, giving her a sedate, composed appearance Gull had not intended; but what unsettled them all most was her having been cut wide open, eviscerated, and then, as it were, put on display. Inspector Chandler had to tussle his way through the milling mob when he arrived to take charge; he then cleared the passageway of onlookers and awaited the divisional surgeon in the yard, which he had had emptied. He had the tarpaulin removed and some sacking put in its place, sensing that a sack was somehow more human, whereas a tarpaulin was for a machine or a fixture. Dr. George Bagster certified Dark Annie as dead and had her removed to the mortuary in the same wheeled shell that Polly Nichols had occupied only a week ago. Searching began, its yield a comb and its paper sheath, together with a piece of muslin from Gull's supply, cut away during his tantrum with the knife. These they added to the rings and coins. Then they found part of an envelope bearing the seal of the Sussex regiment on one side and, on the other, the letter M; the postmark said "London, 28 Aug., 1888." In a twist of paper there were two pills from the casual ward, for pain, and Dark Annie had slipped them into the little fold of the envelope's comer for safe keeping. Without coming into play they had stood intact between her and Gull's knife. Had Sickert seen all this, he would have retched again, knowing as he did, and the raucous mob did not, that Dark Annie had been the second in a special series. It was actually happening, and, in its ramshackle and psychotic way, it was going to happen again, as if Gull controlled the whole world, beyond the power of any queen or prime minister to stop him. He was doing it for the masons, who had finessed his way to the highest medical position in the land; he was paying his debts with a sword and a series of sleepless nights. No one was looking for a pudgy doctor of enormous repute, not yet; the offender was a Jew or a Slav, swarthy with a narrow mustache, shabby-genteel evening clothes, and a rattling, jingling black bag. Various women had been accosted by this man, who had quite openly discussed the first murder and a second and had then made an appointment with them for a drink or something more intimate, at the Queen's Head in Flower and Dean Street, say, or at the Ringers. Suave, well-spoken Lotharios began to come to mind as women began to have fits in the streets. "What's in your bag, sir?" some would say, and remember the answer for as long as they lived: "Something that ladies don't like." Several had seen Dark Annie and her killer haggling in the street, then going through a gate or a doorway together, his arm about her shoulder, where her innards were soon to repose, and this same murderer was supposed to have scrawled on the yard wall "Five; fifteen more and then I give myself up." To some other woman he was supposed to have said "You are beginning to smell a rat. Foxes hunt geese, but they don't always find 'em. " In fact, the man some of them had seen and been addressed by had been the indefatigable and ubiquitous Netley, short and full of rattle, eyeing the clientele in the pubs and the talent in the street, looking for Kelly mainly, but with an eye to Polly Nichols, Dark Annie Chapman and Long Liz Stride, also gently asking questions: "Who's that fine strapping wench by the bar, then?" Moved by the variable grandeur of the whores, he had sometimes made Gull and Sickert wait while he took his pleasure with one or two of them in these very streets, to ease his nerves, he told himself. His chore was both tedious and exacting, out in the air and always, after it all, he had to canter home and clean up the mess, stripping The Crusader of spent and scarlet muslin, mopping and sluicing, and then restoring everything to a fine unmitigated polish. Short, muscular and vibrant, he haunted the by-ways of the East End as if he were the killer himself, and increasingly gave himself a chill by giving others the chills, pretending to be what he was not but grimacing mightily in hell's penumbra and so gaining rewards not compassed in money. If only, he wished, the other two would join him as he strolled the neighborhood, each knowing who he was and who the other two were, which gave them total power over the entire population, knowing as they did which types of knives Gull was not using, how Dark Annie's tongue was going to protrude from her swollen face by dawn, and how she would be dressed and trimmed.
The perfect bloodthirsty hypocrite, he actually paused to help street women who had fits (though they sometimes bit his hand) and to tousle the hair of the filthy Cockney children; he gave to beggars, he shepherded the blind and the maimed, and he bought people drinks as, in a way for him subtle, he imbibed information; in another century he would have been the perfect totalitarian policeman, German or Russian, sent prowling in a raincoat. Curiously enough, in all his wanderings, he saw nobody in bloodstained clothes, heard nobody saying "No" behind a fence or a wall (after which there came the sound of a body falling: he never heard this either), and never came face to face with a single one of the victims, although he often enough ogled them, watched them drinking or vomiting, wiping their face or walking away with someone picked up at the bar. He could, he thought, have paid for and possessed either Polly Nichols or Dark Annie Chapman, and the sight of him on high with his whip and his barracks-room smile, with his enormous member not far beneath it, might have incited them even more than Sickert's debonair diphthongs to enter The Crusader. No need, he decided: after all, they might have said Enough of you for one night, Johnnie-Boy; they would have thought we wanted them in the coach only for pleasure, not serious business, and not got in. So, no. If, like Gull, he suffered from the idée fixe, the idea was usually not very good, whereas Gull, for all his depravity, had a lofty
mind.
For the next few days the tenants of 29 Hanbury Street did a roaring trade, letting sightseers and sensation-seekers look from their windows at the scene of the crime (or at least the scene of the body's deposition). Some more zealous than most pointed out dubious blood stains, none larger than a sixpence, some as small as a housefly. One woman had seen Dark Annie serving at a pub in Spitalfields market only half an hour before her throat was cut. The talk was that the killer had taken the pelvic organs with one sweep of his knife, that there was a growing market for such organs as were missing, and that the amount of innards culled was what would go comfortably into a breakfast cup. John Richardson, who when he was in the market came and checked the padlock on his mother's cellar flaps, she a widow living at 29 Hanbury Street, had sat down and cut a piece of leather from his boot to ease his foot; had he done this an hour later, sitting on the top step, his boots would just about have been on Dark Annie's head. It was not there, he said, at a quarter to five in the morning. A leather apron had been found, which sent the police after John Pizer, a bootmaker who not only wore a deerstalker hat, had several old hats in his possession (ladies') and five long sharp knives as well. The going price for a uterus was twenty pounds. In the end, Pizer sued the newspapers that had libeled him; his alibis were sound, but not his short-lived fame.