Death at Whitechapel (27 page)

Charles was suddenly aware that he had been holding his breath. He let it out. “What did you do with their blackmail demand?”

“What do you think I did? I gave it to Eddy immediately. Annie was lost to him, his marriage was gone, and he was up against it. In despair, he told his father, who told Salisbury and some of his Masonic friends.” He poured himself another cup of tea and sat.

His Masonic friends? Charles sat for a moment, lost in thought. Finally he roused himself. “And then what?”

There was another silence. When Sickert spoke, his voice was thin and reedy. “I don't think Eddy's father, or Salisbury either, intended that murder be done.”

“But murder was done. By the Ripper.”

“Yes. And when the blackmailers were all dead, and another poor soul killed by mistake, he went out of business.”

“That would've been Catherine Eddowes?”

“Right. Eddowes didn't even know the other women. Just before she was killed, she was jailed for drunkenness at Bishopsgate. She gave the policeman the name of Mary Kelly, and she had a pawn ticket in that name in her pocket.”

“A coincidence, I suppose,” Charles said, “but fatal all the same.”

“Indeed. When they got Eddowes, they thought they were done—until the newspapers came out and they realized their mistake.” Sickert shook his head. “I'll never know why Mary Kelly didn't leave the City—too paralyzed with fear, I suppose. Or perhaps she had turned fatalistic. By that time, she might have thought there was nowhere to run. Anyway, they did her on the Prince of Wales's birthday, as a present to him.” He showed his teeth. “Ghoulish, eh?”

Charles was silent. Ghoulish wasn't the word for it. Surely the Prince himself had not ordered this! What kind of deranged mind had imagined such things? Was it Gull's crazed intellect? Or—

“Meanwhile,” Sickert went on, “poor, annihilated Annie was wandering the streets like a lost soul. Eddy was utterly heartsick and couldn't keep himself out of trouble. There was that affair with the male brothel—”

“Just down the street from Annie's flat,” Charles put in.

“Exactly,” Sickert replied. “He
would
come back to the neighborhood every chance he got, poor man. The brothel scandal was quashed pretty as you please, of course, and the one journalist who dared to write of it was bundled off to jail. Eddy was packed off to India out of the way, but once back in England, he fell in with a dissolute crowd that liked to play with boys.” Sickert's smile had no mirth. “At The Hundred Guineas, Eddy was known as Victoria.”

“Ah,” Charles said. The Hundred Guineas was a club where the members assumed women's names and quite often, women's garments.

“It is quite an irony, isn't it?” Sickert cleared his throat. “He was drinking and dissolute—I believe he too was syphilitic—and could no longer be kept under any kind of control. His father thought a wife might rein him in and suggested that he go about getting one, and what did he do?” He smiled dryly. “He proposed to the Princess Helène, another Roman Catholic, which of course sent the Queen into hysterics and brought poor Salisbury to the brink of revolution again—in his imagination, of course.”

“From the Crown's point of view, then,” Charles said, “it was a good thing that the Prince died when he did.” He paused. “Although I've heard...” He let his voice trail off.

“Ah.” Sickert looked directly at him. “What have you heard?”

“That he did not die in ‘92,” Charles said softly. “That he is, even now ... alive.”

It was true. Eddy had become so increasingly irrational and was such an unsuitable heir apparent that news of his demise had clearly come as a relief to the government. In fact, some weeks before the death was announced, Charles had heard that there was a plan afoot to have the prince committed to an asylum, and that after he set a second fire at Sandringham, even his mother had agreed that he must be confined. His reported death and funeral put a stop to the rumors for a time, but soon they were circulating again, and Charles heard it said that Eddy was being held in Balmoral, the royal Scottish residence on the River Dee.

“Even now alive,” Sickert repeated musingly. There was a silence, broken only by the rattle of wheels on the pavement below. “Well, then,” he said finally, “there it is.”

“Yes,” Charles said, “but those are only rumors. I wonder whether you have any direct knowledge.”

Another silence. “Abberline is a better source on that subject than I.” Sickert sounded irritated. “Why can't you get it from him? I've given you everything else you wanted.”

“Not quite,” Charles said. “‘The Ripper—you haven't told me who he was.” He paused. “Who they were.”

Sickert laughed dryly. “They're dead, you know. The whole lot of them. All but the chap who drove the coach. That's where the women were killed—except for Mary. They were lured into the coach with the promise of a fast piece of work at a good price.”

This came as no surprise to Charles. It was common for customers to invite prostitutes into their carriages, to be let out some while later, some distance away. “The coachman's name?”

“Netley. John Netley. He used to drive Eddy to Cleveland Street when he came to visit Annie. Since he already knew the secret, he was recruited to take the Ripper—the rippers—into the East End.”

“Is Netley still in London?”

“He was five years ago, working as a coachman out of a depot at the Great Central Station, in Marylebone.” Sickert scowled. “He tried to run Alice down, you know. Twice. The first time when she was about four. Then again, just before her seventh birthday, in Trafalgar Square. She had to be taken to the hospital that time. He's a bad character, that one. If he's not dead already, I warrant he won't last much longer.”

Charles took a deep breath. “And Gull was the Ripper himself? You're sure of that?”

“Who else could have carved them up so exquisitely besides that old vivisectionist?” Sickert said, in a barbed voice. “But he didn't work alone. And he wasn't the mastermind. Gull had the stomach to be a butcher, but his mind was failing fast. He lacked the wit to think the whole thing through—except for the bloody rituals.” Sickert laughed sarcastically. “He could handle those, all right. Oh, yes, he could handle
those.”

“The rituals,” Charles said slowly. “You're speaking about the mutilations, I take it.”

He had studied the reports of the Coroner's inquests and knew the basic details—and of course he had seen Mary Kelly's body. As he recalled, each of the women (except for Elizabeth Stride, where the Ripper had evidently been interrupted) was mutilated in much the same way: their throats cut from left to right, their abdomens opened to the breastbone, their intestines removed and placed over the shoulder. In the last two killings, organs were missing: Catherine Eddowes' kidney and uterus, Mary Kelly's heart. In the latter killings, as well, rough triangles had been cut in the victims' faces.

“Yes,” Sickert said, “I'm speaking of the mutilations.” There was a pause, and when he spoke again, his voice held a note of half-veiled surprise. “When you see Abberline, give the fellow my thanks, will you? I must say, it's a relief to talk about it, even ten years later. Get the whole thing off my chest, as it were.” He straightened and said in sudden realization, “By Jove, it is ten years, isn't it? Ten years, almost exactly. Mary Kelly was murdered on the ninth of November.” He gave a harsh laugh. “HRH's birthday. Quite a gift, that, from his fellow Freemasons.”

Charles looked up. It was true, then. His suspicions were correct.

“You don't look surprised,” Sickert said. “I suppose it had already occurred to you, then.”

“Just now, actually,” Charles said. Although now that he thought of it, he couldn't understand why it hadn't come to him before.

“I suppose,” Sickert said, “I had better explain that angle, although I should have thought Abberline would have done so, since he was the one who found it out and told it to me.” He gave Charles a slantwise look. “You are a Freemason?”

“I was once,” Charles said, “when I was in the Army. I'm afraid I did not take it very seriously, or rise through the degrees, or pay much attention to the rituals.”

“Well, then.” Sickert sipped his tea, then put down the cup. “Do you remember hearing anything about a message chalked on a passageway wall at the scene of Catherine Eddowes' murder?”

“Indeed, I witnessed it myself,” Charles said. “I was called to photograph the scene, but it was very early in the morning and there was not yet enough light. What I saw was written in a strong, well-shaped hand, and the words were quite clear.”

“But you didn't photograph it?”

“Commissioner Warren came, just at sunrise. He sponged the wall himself, fearing that the message might incite a riot. There wasn't an opportunity to photograph it, unfortunately.”

“And do you remember what it said?”

“It was so enigmatically worded that I have never forgotten it,” Charles said. He quoted: “‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.'”

“And I suppose you took the word
Juwes
to be a misspelling for the word
Jews,
and were not surprised by the commissioner's action.”

“Oh, I was surprised,” Charles said, “as was everyone there. Several of the detectives, particularly those of the City Police, were nearly livid. The message was the first real clue, the only clue ever left by the Ripper. It could have been photographed, then covered with a blanket and the passageway guarded so that it was not seen by the public. No one present could understand why the commissioner did such a thing. It seemed totally incompetent.”

“An incompetent policeman, a competent Freemason,” Sickert said dryly.

“A Freemason?” Charles asked in surprise, then checked himself. Of course, Warren was a Freemason. Most of the men in positions of authority were Freemasons. In fact, that's how some of them got those positions.

Sickert ticked off Warren's titles. “A District Grand Master, a Past Grand Sojourner of the Supreme Grand Chapter, and member of the Royal Alpha Lodge, of which Eddy himself was the Right Worshipful Master. It was Commissioner Warren's sacred obligation to scrub off that declaration, in order to protect the men who wrote it. They were also Freemasons.”

Charles stared at him, the whole thing beginning to make a gruesome sense. So the word “Juwes” didn't refer to Jews, but to Jubel, Jubelo, and Jubelum, the three apprentice Masons who, according to tradition, treacherously murdered their Grand Master and were ritually executed for the crime. Freemasons referred to them collectively as the
Jues
—a deliberate allusion to the Jews who crucified Jesus Christ. And the Ripper's mutilation, the removal of the women's intestines mirrored the way the three
Jues
were punished for their betrayal, their vitals taken out and thrown over the left shoulder. It had become the symbolic penalty for revealing the secrets of Freemasonry.

“So the mutilation,” Charles murmured, “was in effect a secret code, making clear to the initiated who was responsible for the killings.”

“Exactly,” Sickert said. “And remember that the victim was found in Mitre Square, and that a piece of her apron was cut off and placed directly under the message.”

The mitre and the square, Charles thought—the Masons' tools. Mitre Square itself had been named for the Mitre Tavern, where Freemasons had met for two centuries. And the apron—of course! He himself had taken a photograph of Prince Eddy and the Prince of Wales wearing their Masonic regalia: ceremonial aprons made of white lambskin and lined with white silk, meant to symbolize the aprons worn by stonemasons. The clues were so clear, so unmistakably clear, as long as one understood the arcane lore of Freemasonry.

Watching Charles's face, Sickert smiled. “I see that you're getting the picture.”

“I am,” Charles said. “The women were killed to keep them silent, and mutilated as a—a what? A Masonic joke? A warning?”

Sickert shrugged. “Who knows? The Freemasons are fond of symbolic acts, so it might have been a gesture of tribute to the Master of their lodge. Or perhaps they thought it would silence other persons who might have some scandalous information they thought to turn into ready money. Or perhaps the mastermind behind the crimes was simply engaging in a cruel joke. The man was certainly capable of it. He was mad, you know.”

“Who?” Charles demanded. “
Who?
”

“Why, don't you know?” Sickert said. His face was twisted. He laughed unpleasantly. “It was Lord Randy, of course.”

“Randolph?”
Charles whispered, feeling suddenly sick.

“Mad as a hatter,” Sickert said. “Mad as the great Gull. The newspapers got that right, at least. It was the work of a warped mind.”

For a long moment, Charles could not speak. At last, he said, “Is there any proof?”

“I doubt it. Or if there is, you'll never see it, nor will anyone else. It is buried deep in the bowels of Whitehall. I learned what I know from Eddy's tutor, James Stephen. He was a brilliant man—called to the bar, kept chambers, wrote poetry. He had been treated by the grand and glorious Gull for a head injury, and the two knew one another well. He told me and Abberline, together, what he knew, and then he died.” He added, with heavy irony, “It is said that he starved himself to death.”

“Starved—” Charles could go no further.

“That's the official report,” Sickert said. “It's all a very bad business and best forgotten. There have been times when I've feared for my own life. But Alexandra likes me, because of my affection for Eddy. That's what's kept me alive, I think.” He cocked his head, listening. “Someone's coming up the stairs. Perhaps I should have told you about—”