I. YOU KNOW ME ALREADY
There have been many more before the five they are giving me the credit for. There have been even more since. And I am most certainly not done yet. I have simply changed my ways, fooling everyone, including detectives, police, journalists and every Tom, Dick and Harry that fancies himself an investigator.
They have given me many names, none of them true to my own. I’ve been called “The Knife”, “Saucy Jack”, “The Ripper”, and “Leather Apron” to name but a few. They have described me in many ways, never coming close to what I look like, how I act or why I do what I do. I was said to be short, tallish, not so tall, dark complexioned, with moustache, without any facial hair, foreign looking, an imbecile, have an appearance of an aristocrat, look like a clerk, a butcher, a dodgy character, and a whole list of other descriptions they could possibly think of. They reckon I am a woman hater, impotent, a fellow who doesn’t want to pay for the services, a failed surgeon… They even toyed with the idea that I was a woman, taking revenge on prostitutes, because her sweetheart had found more comfort in them than in her.
They said I hate women. That is not entirely true. I used to love women, all of them. I believe I still do. I’ve been with young, not so young, and old; pretty, handsome, and ugly; tall, short, skinny and plump. Rich women, poor women, heiresses and prostitutes have all found their way into my bed or a hidden spot in an alley. There had been Brits, Irish, Scots and Welsh, as well as any other kind that comes across the water, seeking a refuge and home in this country of ours, ruled by the queen bee of all women, Victoria. Now, that would be a trophy beyond any other, but for obvious reasons, I have not attempted to take possession of her. Imagine, if you will, the elaborate headlines that would spring up should I ever succeed in hunting her down like a dog and skinning her like the rabbit that she is? I shiver with pleasure at the mere thought of it.
I have spanked some, beaten others into a pulp, killed and even eaten parts of a few. I always felt like they were a part of me once I had their lives in my hands. Usually, I wouldn’t let them have it back either.
Then again, there were some to whom I was nothing but civil. A dinner, a stroll on the banks of the river Thames, an obscure play at the local theatre, visiting galleries and browsing through flea markets. I have done it all, usually in the company of a lady, or at least a woman. They had no idea who the man, whose company they found amusing at the least, and absolutely exhilarating at the best really was.
This is an account of how it all began, and to my great amusement it’s still continuing, alas, people don’t put two and two together. I do believe there are a few who know that these women, I count over fifty to date, have been killed by the same person or persons. However, to keep the public at rest and not create a generalized hysteria they don’t speak of it.
I don’t really mind it, to be quite honest. I have had my moment of fame; or rather full six weeks of it. It was exhilarating to see my name in the newspapers, at least the one given to me by the public; absolutely hilarious to read all those ridiculous theories, which some twenty years later seem to multiply by a few a month. I have to admit that although it was very fulfilling to be the centre of attention, it did make my life and more importantly my work much more difficult.
After killing Polly the whole hell broke loose and the next four I did not enjoy as much as I normally would have. I had to be careful, constantly looking about, listening for footsteps and sounds of a carriage more than usual. People eyed everyone with suspicion, even myself, although nobody ever seriously considered me a suspect. Once the police decided to announce the fact that I was dead and people relaxed, everything became easy again, just as it was in the beginning.
II. THE GREATEST LOSS
I was born in London in the year of our Lord 1855, as my brother would say. God bless him, he’s a priest, you see. The more the fool for it, I say. I was unwanted, just like almost every other child I had come across in the East End, where my mother took refuge and tried her best to make a living. She was a hard worker, at least in the early part of my life, of which I don’t remember much. She worked as a laundress, a maid, sold ale in the taverns and laboured in factories. We lived in a small attic room above the apothecary on Mile End Street, a place full of mice and rats, spiders and other creepy crawlies, generally disgusting creatures that had a nasty habit of sneaking into one’s bed and tickling the soles of their feet or face, making one jump up in the dead of night, covered in sweat and wondering if one was going to fall victim to some illness or other.
Another stigma that was attached to me was that of an illegitimate child, a bastard. My mother, like thousands of other women had a misfortune to be poor and illiterate, uneducated and unsophisticated. As it is common nowadays, it was the habit of smart and wealthy gentlemen to take to silly girls, use them and throw them away, uncaring of their predicament, even if it was doubled by pregnancy.
I had no idea of who my father was until I was about ten years old and my mother had died. Alas, I am jumping ahead of myself! So, a bastard, with mother who had no money, living in poor quarters that seemed to have cost her an arm and a leg, she decided that she might settle her debts faster if she was to work as a prostitute. She was quite fascinated by them, you see.
She would stand at the window for hours on end, watching them, spitting insults and ugly words, too ugly for my young ears to hear. She would call them whores and rats, abominations and devil spawns. And yet, she always noticed that if their luck were good, they would appear wearing beautiful bonnets, nice frocks and always had plenty of money for a drink. Men were paying attention, even if it was of the wrong kind. Attention is attention, I suppose. When one doesn’t have any, one craves it, no matter how unglamorous its origins.
For a while, my mother would work at her respectable jobs during the day, once or twice a week venturing out into the street at night, looking for johns as she had called them, doing her business somewhere in the alley. She would return in the early hours of the morning, wake me up and press a shilling or two into the palm of my hand, a broad smile on her face. “Go and fetch us a nice breakfast, laddie.” She would say.
I’d run out to the corner bakery and request the best they had. We would feast on white, still warm buns, filled with a piece of cheese and if the night business was really successful, there was enough money to afford salami or ham. Those were the best times that I remember having with my mother. She stopped worrying about the lack of funds for the rent. We had both acquired better clothes and on Sundays she would take me to Trafalgar Square and allow me to play in the park, a day of leisure even for my mother. It always ended with an enormous cone of ice cream of different colours and flavours. I really loved my mum then.
The trouble started that winter. It had gotten colder than it was usual for that time of the year. It rained every single day and many a morning I would wake up to find the streets covered in thin layer of snow. People were running about bundled up in heavy coats, hats and scarves hiding their heads, sometimes their entire faces. My mother had felt it, too. She would come home in the mornings so tired and cold that sometimes I would have to rub her hands and feet until they got warm enough for her to be able to fall asleep.
I noticed that the mornings when she would send me out for breakfast were becoming a more rare occurrence. She failed to keep the money she earned, most of it lost before it reached our home. She told me, on her own accord, that she had a drink or two in order to keep herself warm while waiting on a customer. Gradually, that drink turned into four or five, then even more, I suppose. There were times when I had found her at our front door, sleeping like a beggar, and strong smell of alcohol creating an invisible, yet disgusting cloud around her. There were times when she stank so much, I was deeply ashamed. My always-clean mother had become like every other whore in the street.
She had also given up on all her other daytime jobs, as she had been drinking too much to be productive and reliable. Now, she went out every night, returning in the early morning, sometimes not until the early hours of the second day. Our finances became scarce again, and the only reason Mr. Elvey, the man who owned the apothecary let us stay was because I helped him with deliveries of medicines and would clean the store thoroughly in the evenings. I must have been about seven or eight at the time. Mr. Elvey had taught me how to read well enough, so that I was able to deliver his packages to appropriate addresses and I was immensely grateful. My mother had gone downhill and my education was the last thing on her mind. I also suspect Mr. Elvey felt sorry for me and many a time he would invite me to have a humble dinner with him in the back room of the apothecary, after the business hours were over.
The winter passed and the spring was nice, followed by an extraordinarily hot summer. There was no reason for my mother to continue drinking in order to keep herself warm, but she did. I never said a word about it; I only wished that my old mum were back; kind and nice, funny and attentive. It was not to pass, however.
Quite the contrary, instead of paying me attention, she began bringing her customers to our little room. I would be awoken in the dead of night and pushed out of bed, sometimes ran into the street and told to stay away for a while. At other times she would just motion to the chair behind the stove. I sat still and listened to the grunts of a man who she was servicing, smelling the heavy scent of sex, so disgusting to a young nose.
Generally, she would simply bend over, still standing and supporting her upper body with her hands flat on the bed, hiking up her skirts, while the fellow dropped his trousers and did his business. It was usually very quick, a few minutes and he was gone. She would let her skirts drop and without washing walk out the door, ignoring me, only to be back some half an hour later with another man.
I never found it amusing or arousing, I suppose I was too young to understand it completely. During the last few months of her life, when I was ten, she wouldn’t let me stay in the room when she was “entertaining” and I had spent many a night prowling the dark streets of London, observing other whores at work, watching drunk men stagger against the walls, shouting obscenities at me and everyone else. Life was not fun then, but it was interesting.
I can’t ever remember us having any proper visitors in our humble little home. I don’t count customers into that equation. As far as I was concerned, they were intruders into both of our lives, unwilling trespassers for me, more willing to my mother. I was very surprised then, when one morning there was a knock on the door, and I could hear Mr. Elvey calling out to me. “Eddie?” he yelled. “Eddie? Are you in there?”
The first surprise of a visitor over, I was even more dumbfounded by the fact that the landlord himself had come to the door. Even at our poorest, when my mother had owed months of back rent he never intruded on us like that, showing up at our door. Uneasy feeling squeezed at my heart and I lay in bed for a moment longer, hoping that Mr. Elvey would go away.
“Eddie?” yelled an unknown male voice and a powerful bang followed, throwing me out of the bed as if I had just rolled over on a spring. I opened the door and peeped outside, weary of the intrusion.
The landlord stood there sheepishly, wringing his arms as if in great distress, accompanied by a sombre Constable, whom I remembered seeing on the streets at night from time to time.
“Good morning, Eddie.” Smiled Mr. Elvey, but his eyes remained pained, as if the worry had now become even greater. “Is your mother in, lad?”
I turned around, well aware that she was not in the room, checking just for the sake of it. I shook my head in response and the Constable pushed the door open and let himself in without an invitation from me.
“Put some clothes on, lad.” He said softly, looking around the room in disgust. “You need to come to the station with me.”
“Why?” was the first thing I had said since being awoken by the knocking. “I din’t do nuffin’.”
“Oh, my sweet boy.” Said Mr. Elvey, now following the policeman and petting my head. “We know that. It’s your mother.”
To make a long and painful story short, I followed the Constable to the station, the landlord kindly escorting me. I was presented by a gurney, which obviously held a dead body, covered with a grey, thick blanket. I was quiet all the way, afraid of what was awaiting me, not at all prepared with what I had seen.
“Are you ready?” asked a different policeman, who was standing by the gurney, as if guarding its hidden contents. I shook my head, knowing that it must have been my mother’s body that they were going to show to me.
“Well,” said the Constable who got me out of bed. “We don’t have time, so you need to look very closely and tell me if this is your mother.”
With that, I felt Mr. Elvey’s hands grab onto my shoulders and squeeze them as if to give me strength and the blanket was uncovered. At first, I didn’t recognize the face. The eyes were shut tight and bruised badly, black and blue shine reflecting in the poor light the lamp hanging off the ceiling above the gurney. The nose was oddly crooked, obviously broken with a small amount of blood caked around the nostrils. Her hair was in disarray, knotted and loose, much unlike the way my mother would have kept it, neat in a bun at the top of the neck. She looked much older than her barely thirty years.
“Is this your mother?” asked somebody; I can’t remember who it was. Mr. Elvey’s hands were squeezing my shoulders, and the pain of it made me stay focused, or I probably would have fainted. I have seen dead bodies before, drunks and homeless people laying in gutters, dogs and horses pushed to the side of the street, awaiting someone to come and clean up the mess.
This was not just another drunken beggar, or a misfortunate animal. This was my mother. Despite the appearance of a stranger, I knew instantly that it was she. I nodded my head and burst into tears. It was the last time anyone would see me crying. After that, I suppose one might say my heart hardened and nothing would ever touch me quite in a way as it did when I saw my dead mother, beaten into a pulp by an unknown assailant.
III. LADY LUCK AND MY NEMESIS
My first victim if you want to call her that, was purely accidental, although the incident did seem to trigger off that something inside my head or it might have been my soul, which led me to keep doing-in many more, never able to stop. Never wanted to, anyway.
After my mother’s death, I was afraid I would have to go to an orphanage, which, despite the harsh life in London’s East End would have been a hell to go through in comparison. When I returned home after identifying my mother’s body, Mr. Elvey reassured me that he would not allow me to be taken away. He told me that my mother had left him instructions on what to do in case something happened to her. In need of the money from the rent, I vacated the small room in the attic and slept in one of the rooms in Mr. Elvey’s rather luxurious home not far from the Mile End Road.
To my utter disbelief, about a week after the burial, a fine gentleman came to the apothecary where I was scrubbing the floor one evening, asking for Mr. Elvey and eyeing me warmly.
The landlord and the strange nobleman were whispering in hushed voices for a while, from time to time glancing at me, making me extremely nervous. I didn’t want to leave London and go into a service to some posh and arrogant Lord. My mother had always told me to be careful of people, and that advice I had taken to my heart.
“My dear boy.” Said the man, and I straightened up with a jerk, my body tense with anticipation. He motioned for me to approach and only the kind smile from Mr. Elvey persuaded me to do so.
“I cannot express the sorrow that I feel for you in the light of what has happened.” I nodded and stared at my battered shoes. There was nothing I could think of to say. “You have been through a tremendous shock and Mr. Elvey here…” the two men looked at each other soberly and the stranger continued: “…Well, he told me that you were worried about what the future might have in store for you.”
Still, I remained silent. My mother’s bruised and bloodied face kept flashing in my mind, the notion of what she went through in her last moments making me woozy and nauseous.
“This was not an easy trip for me to take, and I have thought about it very carefully for a long time, you understand.” He went on. Even though I had no idea of what was to come, I appreciated the way he had spoken to me, as if I were an adult and not a child that I really had been. “I think we should all sit down and have a little chat, just the three of us.” Said the stranger and as if waiting for the signal, Mr. Elvey locked the store and turned the front door sign to CLOSED, showing us the way to the back.
We entered a small room where Mr. Elvey and his helpers would mix and prepare medicines. It was full of tall shelves, thousands of bottles, small, large, emerald green, honey brown and colourless, some sporting blank labels, others cautionary signs with skull and bones in red, warning the handler to be mindful of its contents. I have always liked the medicinal smells in the doctors’ offices or apothecaries. They are sharp and odd, yet in some way quite soothing. They give the place an aura of importance and mystique.
We settled around the table in the corner of the room, where Mr. Elvey would spend hours, carefully writing out the instructions to the patients in his educated, beautiful handwriting. Sometimes that table would serve as a dining nook, although it wasn’t too often I or anybody else had eaten lunch on it.
Mr. Elvey sat next to me, holding onto my shoulder as if giving me strength. The mysterious stranger and his attention had started to grind on me. I was nervous and my eyes flicked between the kindly landlord and the newcomer.
“Well,” deep sigh escaped the man I didn’t know. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?” With a corner of my eye I could see Mr. Elvey nodding his head. The stranger took off his top hat and a flood of soft blond curls fell onto his shoulders. He had hair much like mine I noticed, of which my mother had been so proud. I noticed that he was younger than I first thought, probably in his early twenties, although when one is ten, anyone twice their age seems to appear ancient.
“My name is Julian and I hope it will please you to know that I am your half-brother.” He got straight to the point, peering at me wonderingly.
Well, you could have knocked old Eddie over with a feather, as the saying goes. Recollecting each word of the conversation would be redundant as it was very long and detailed. Julian talked a lot with Mr. Elvey interrupting sometimes with questions and comments of his own, while I simply sat still, staring at one then the other, too numb to respond or even think of anything to say. I learned about my family, of which my mother never spoke, and I simply presumed they were all deceased. My grandfather, apparently, was a butler in Julian’s father’s household, having the privilege of his wife and three children living in a small cottage on the premises. Nothing much was said about the affair from which I was born, it was all kept a secret and nobody knew the details, not even Julian.
