The Art of Murder (16 page)

It was hot and sticky still, the air heavy and cloying. A storm was brewing. I went to hail a cab and found myself discombobulated. The cab slowed, but then the driver took one look at me and whipped on his horse. I had to smile at the efficacy of my own disguise. Turning, I walked a few yards back along the road and found another hansom waiting for passengers from the station. When I approached the cab driver and told him where I wanted to go, he gave me a puzzled look and was about to pull away without a reply when I told him I would pay double in advance.

‘Show us it then, matey boy,’ he said.

I pulled out half a crown and handed it to him. ‘Righty-ho, sir,’ he said. ‘Jump in.’ He flicked his whip and we were away.

I sat back as the cab wove a course through the busy streets, and simply soaked up the atmosphere of this incomparable place. London … the greatest city in the world by far. This was a city the Emperors
of Rome would have envied. I know, dear lady, that you have yourself been to London many times. Your husband told me this. But I also know that you have led a rather cloistered life in the Berkshire countryside, so you must indulge me in my recollections of my sense of rapture upon finding myself here a free agent at last. Here I was, newly graduated from Oxford, a young man with very clear ideas of what he was about to do. No wonder I was excited.

The storm broke as the cab bounced over the cobblestones of Tottenham Court Road. From inside my cab, I could see pedestrians scatter for cover as thunder hammered overhead and lightning ripped open the sky. I heard the driver seated on his box behind me yelling at the horse and then his whip crack above the beast’s rump.

The journey seemed interminable. Even my enthusiasm for the place began to wear thin. I had arranged my accommodation already, contacting a landlord through an advertisement in the
Oxford Times
. I wanted something in the heart of Whitechapel and had no qualms about the sordid condition of most of the dwelling places there. In fact, the filthier it was, the better I would consider it to be. I was quite confident that I could look after myself. As we approached the address of the lodgings, I asked the cab driver to pull over to the side of Whitechapel Road. I did not want the neighbours to see me arriving in a hansom. I jumped down, pulling my bag over my shoulder, and headed
over the uneven, rubbish-strewn cobbles with my hat tugged low over my face and my head down against the still driving rain. The weather was on my side, I thought.

My new lodgings were on Wentworth Street. I rented a single room above a corn-chandler’s shop. The shopkeeper, a Mr Girthwright, owned the building. His shop was crammed full of bird cages, broody hens, baskets of eggs, seed and corn. It was more farm than shop, and the stink of bird excrement and rotting straw seeped through the ceiling into the rooms above.

The room itself was wonderfully squalid. Just what I was looking for. I needed to soak up the atmosphere, melt into the crowd, become part of the local landscape. I was priming myself, making ready for my project, my grand work, the one that would make my name immortal.

It was a mean room, a low ceiling surmounting brown walls that had been papered last when Victoria was a young woman. The floor was of bare boards. There was a narrow bed, a rusted gas mantle, no form of heating. A single ornament hung on the wall above the bed: a crucifix. But, as crude and unprepossessing a place as this was, I knew from my studies of the area that this house was one of the better lodgings to be found here. It was not uncommon for four families to share a place this size, and the exorbitant price demanded for it – three shillings a week – was justified if I were to have my privacy. That was the last thing I could afford to
sacrifice. I dropped my bag to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, looking around my new home, feeling immensely pleased with myself.

By the time I left the building, the sky had turned russet, casting a striking light across the buildings and the still-wet streets. The rain had passed and the stink of the place was reasserting itself. It was a smell I had never before experienced, a blend of so many odours: soot, tar, rotten food and human waste. There was also a salty tang to the air, the southerly breeze wafting into the narrow streets the stench of the river.

I had not visited a place even remotely like this, and it thrilled me inordinately. I knew all the stories about this part of London. How the poor had been expelled from the Rookeries around St Giles to the west of the City, their old slums razed. The countless, faceless hordes of bedraggled humanity had swept eastward just a few miles and turned the East End of London into the cesspit it now was. It was, dear lady, Hell on Earth, a place Londoners refer to as ‘the Stew’, and I loved it immediately.

How do I begin to express its unique atmosphere, especially to one so well bred and closeted as your good self? I’ve tried to convey the smell, but really this was just one element in the overall experience. Indeed, one could almost describe the process of walking out of my lodgings and on to the street as something of an overloading of the senses, for everything about it piqued and challenged my perceptions.

Immediately outside the door to my lodgings, a pieman had set up. He had placed a small box-shaped container on short metal legs on the cobblestones. On top of this lay a row of meat pies kept warm by a small fire burning inside the box. The pieman wore a short jacket and a dirty kerchief. His top hat was pushed back at a rakish angle and he wore a brown-smeared apron about his waist. A woman stood beside him. She looked ill, with pinched cheeks and dark hollows beneath her eyes. Immediately in front of the pie stand stood a young boy in a cloth cap, calling for customers. He was crouching on one knee and held a pair of coins in his hand which he tossed into the air. ‘Toss and buy,’ he called, inviting customers to have a turn at guessing which way the coins fell while they waited for their pie.

It was the time of the evening when the streets were beginning to fill. The few residents who had jobs were returning from their labours, and others, the prostitutes or ‘brides’ as I knew they were called by the locals, were just about to start their evening’s work.

The workmen looked particularly bedraggled. I saw a young man, his face as pale as death, hair already thinning, eyes hollow. He almost knocked my shoulder as he swayed, half-drunk, along the narrow pavement. I caught the stench of him, fish and brine, and I knew that he was a waterman, one of those who pulled corpses from the Thames in the hope of finding something valuable, be it a farthing
sewn into a seam or a gold tooth pulled from a corpse.

Crossing a lane that led on to Whitechapel Road, a group of four exhausted figures passed by. These were paupers on their way from the labour yard where those without any gainful employment spent twelve hours a day breaking stones and rocks for a few pennies. Then a more colourful sight: a ‘budgerigar man’, a slight fellow in an off-white top hat standing behind a hastily erected table covered with a frayed cloth. Four budgerigars perched along his outstretched arm. On the table top lay four cards. ‘Guess the card and win yourself a night out!’ the man called as I approached. I ignored him, but watched fascinated as a young couple stepped up.

The girl was giggling as her male friend offered the budgerigar man a farthing. ‘Which one would the lady like to choose?’ the man behind the table quizzed, ogling her. ‘Could be your lucky night, my darlin’.’ The girl tittered stupidly and nuzzled up to her beau. The young man chose for her, second from the left. The budgerigar man pocketed the money and lowered his arm to allow one of the birds to hop on to the table. The budgerigar paraded importantly up and down next to the cards, then stopped and pecked at one of them: the second from the left. The woman squealed and threw her hands to her mouth. I walked on, wondering how many times the budgerigar man would let the couple win before he turned the tables on them.

Now, dear lady, you must not think me a
completely idle fellow because this little exploratory trip was serving a definite purpose. I was heading somewhere and I knew exactly where it was. My destination was the Pavilion, or the ‘Pav’ as the locals preferred, a music hall of the most wretchedly sordid kind, but an entirely suitable place of entertainment for the residents of Hell.

How do I begin to conjure up a clear portrayal of the Pav? It would be much easier for me to paint the place. But I will try. I want you to have every detail.

The front of the building gave no clue as to what went on inside. It looked like a simple, decent theatre. But beyond the doors, the place was a haven for the lower orders. Great rough wooden tables ran the entire length of the main hall, and upon either side of these stretched benches. By nine each evening every single space on the benches was taken, beer mugs were constantly refilled with cheap, watered-down ale, and the venue burst into life.

As you may gather, I went to the Pav on many occasions. Indeed I purchased a box there for no less than five guineas. I was captivated by the place that very first night of my new life in London. Before I had slept a single night in the Stew, I had made myself at home at the New Royal Pavilion Theatre, to give it its proper name. What was it that I loved so much there? I hear you ask. I think it was the sense of barely masked hopelessness, the ludicrous lengths to which people go in order to forget temporarily the vileness of life. Thomas Hobbes once wrote: ‘Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short’, but any nascent realisation that the average person may have of this may be dispelled with enough beer down their throat; enough rowdy music, sly innuendo and double-entendre; enough time with a whore on their lap. Or, for the richer desperadoes, enough opium in their blood. But it’s all a ridiculous falsehood, all a pretence, and it amused me enormously to watch the faces of the cattle at the trough, trying to make all that is bad in the world go away. Only one thing makes that disappear, and it is not something you find in a music hall. At least, not directly. At least, not until Yours Truly arrived in the neighbourhood.

But, dear lady, forgive me, I digress again. I seem to have something of a penchant for it, do I not? Let me get back to the point. There were two very important consequences to my sojourn along Whitechapel Road and my trip to the Pav. First, it led me to the women I was later to slaughter. And second, it was the place in which I was to meet your husband, Archibald, a man who ended up playing a significant role in the events which were to unfold during the late summer and autumn of this year.

I’ve not mentioned Archibald before this point. This was not, of course, due to any desire on my part to save your feelings. You must know me better than that. But now I come to the part of my story when Mr Thomson makes his first appearance.

No doubt you knew one face of the man. I knew several. We would doubtless agree that Archibald was a hard-working, intelligent, industrious and
quaintly ambitious fellow. These things will be said at his funeral. Goodness, I wish I could be there! But there were other aspects to your husband, about which I imagine you had little inkling.

The Pav, that wonderful establishment, was not merely a music hall. The owners earned a tidy sum from all the four-penny pieces handed over at the admissions desk and the half-penny a pint they charged for the slops they passed off as beer, but they, like all of us, were greedy men who knew a captive audience when they saw one. Imagination not being their forte, the theatre owners turned the floor above it into a brothel.

I discovered this on my second visit to the Pav and was thrilled by the revelation. I had spent all of twenty-four hours in Whitechapel, and in my mind had already started to sketch in the details of my planned endeavour. I had decided that there would be four women. Why four? Symmetry perhaps. Four suits to a deck of cards? Four sides to a square? Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Actually, none of these ideas crossed my mind. Some, I understand, after the event, tried to find connections between my work and the doings of the Freemasons, the Anarchists, even members of the Royal Family, for Hell’s sake! None of these things were in my mind in July. I admit, I played around a little, leaving false clues, but these were for my own amusement and had no foundation in political or, the Devil help me,
spiritual
reflections. So why four? It just felt right.

Four women. I had given some thought to the methods and procedures, but had yet to select my candidates. And I did feel the need for structure here, some element of form. Because all art has form, no matter how loose it may be. When I learned of the brothel above the Pav, some of the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. I now had a fitting source for my human materials.

Now, dear lady, you may already have surmised an important fact about Yours Truly. That is, I have no desire for women. Indeed, I have no sexual drive whatsoever. I don’t know why this is, and I don’t care. It is not something I ever dwell upon. I know that for generations to come learned men will postulate and ponder, they will probe what they believe to be my mental make-up. But they will not know me as I know myself, no matter how clever those men may be. They will suggest all manner of sexual aberrations, but really, you have to believe me, there is nothing to that theory. And, quite frankly, I could not be more pleased, for what a terrible waste of energy sex is. What purpose does it serve? If you gain no pleasure from it, it is merely an act of procreation, and the last thing the world needs is more children. So I was not in the brothel for the usual reasons. I was there to paint, and to select.

Soon after I stumbled upon the existence of the brothel above the Pav, I made it my business to explore the place. Exploration is key to what I do, an essential discipline that enables me always to keep one step ahead of the police. Careful not to draw
attention to myself, I rapidly learned how the upper rooms were laid out and how some of them interconnected. I soon discovered a clever little network of secret passages and escape routes built into the shell of the building.