‘I must get myself home. My husband will give me a good hiding – he must be going spare worrying.’
‘Rightly so,’ he said.
‘What’s the time then?’
‘Gone one.’
As if John would give a rat’s arse where she’d got to. He’d doubtless already spent any money he’d come by on himself and got his bed at Cooney’s Lodging House. But Kate was well in the habit of giving a certain impression to those she needed on her side – a habit she’d learned during her days selling ballads, singing on the street. If you presented yourself in a particular way, people warmed to you a little faster, treated you a little kinder, and you could sell them pretty much anything once they liked you. It was important to understand your audience, and the police had very traditional expectations of what a woman should be: respectable, demure, obedient, an ordinary wife and mother, just like her sisters. Certainly not a wandering balladeer with her husband’s initials tattooed on her arm.
‘Can you recall your name now, Mrs Nothing?’ asked Mr Byfield.
‘Mary Ann Kelly,’ said Kate.
‘Address?’
‘6 Fashion Street.’
They returned her belongings: six small pieces of soap, a comb, a table knife, a spoon, tin boxes of tea and sugar, an empty matchbox, needles and pins, a thimble, a red leather cigarette case and her black clay pipes. She secreted each of them away in her skirts like a squirrel, taking pleasure in every one, smiling and poking her tongue out as she hid them in different places on her person.
Mr Byfield ignored the fact that she had clearly given a false address. She was obviously of no fixed abode, for to carry such items was the habit of a dosser with no place to store tin pots or spoons. He very much doubted her name was Mary Ann Kelly either, but she seemed such a harmless little bird, burrowing her possessions away in her skirts.
Mr Hull opened the big swing door onto the passageway out and held it as she tottered through. ‘That’s the door out, Mrs Kelly. Mind you take yourself straight home now,’ he said. ‘Be sure to pull that door to when you leave,’ he shouted after her, ‘or else it won’t shut properly!’
‘I will. Goodnight, old cock,’ said Kate, making sure not to close the door behind her.
29
My bedroom door never was kicked in that Sunday night on the last day of September. Neither my husband nor Dr Shivershev came thundering into the house baying for my blood. And so, eventually, I fell asleep.
But, next morning, there was news.
YET MORE WHITECHAPEL ATROCITIES WOMAN MURDERED NEAR COMMERCIAL ROAD WOMAN MURDERED IN ALDGATE THROATS CUT AND FACE SLASHED
1 October 1888
Two more women were found slain in London yesterday morning. The corpse of Elizabeth Stride was discovered in Berner Street, Whitechapel, with her head nearly severed from her body. Catherine Eddowes was found in Mitre Square in Aldgate, in the City. Her throat had been cut and her body mutilated in the most hideous way.
The gruesome injuries found on the past victims in this tragic series were almost exactly played out with these two new unfortunates. Both victims were known to be night wanderers and of a certain class.
The murderer, who it seems is the same, lone lunatic, grows bolder with each crime. With unnerving precision, he slaughtered two in the same hour, under the night sky, his chosen charnel-house.
No more is known at this time, and there is every likelihood no more will ever be known. It is impossible to avoid the depressing conclusion that the police will fail to find the murderer of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, as they have failed for Annie Chapman, Mary Ann Nichols, Martha Tabram and Emma Smith.
The most agonising of the East End mysteries is the incompetent paralysis of the police, who flounder while the most vulnerable inhabitants of the East End must continue to live in fear.
I could not deny that this ‘double event’, as the newspapers were calling it, had me enthralled, just as its gruesome precedents had. Reading the stories that Monday was a welcome distraction from my own troubles – or at least I allowed myself to see it as a distraction, despite the concerns about the increasingly bizarre situation I found myself in. I sent Sarah out at two-hourly intervals, bidding her come back with the new editions, and I took up residence in the back dining room, devouring the reports, clipping out the columns and pasting them into my scrapbook.
Sarah also returned with snippets of gossip overheard at the newsstands. Ladies who had, like me, enjoyed their perverse slumming tours were now feeling rather differently, since the killer had moved beyond the East End and into the City. What an outrage! Sympathy for Long Liz and Kate appeared to be muted: to the comfortable of the west, these two latest victims morphed into a single composite image of a wretched, self-destructive, alcoholic whore, defined only by her fecklessness, poverty and diseases. This ‘other’ woman, this creature who must live at the bottom and stay there so they could keep their rightful place above, had begun to encroach into their territory.
To return some dignity to Long Liz – or ‘Elizabeth the Melody’, as I came to see her – and to my sparrow-like Kate of want and plenty, I took up my notebook again. I had plenty of material. There were acres of newsprint on the poor women, and out of them I fashioned my own dramas, as I had with Little Lost Polly and Dark Annie. I wanted in my own way to accompany them through their last evening on this earth, grimy and lacking though it surely must have been. Who knew how long it would be before I joined their ranks.
On the Berner Street yard where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found there was a club that was popular with socialists, political radicals and Jews. The evening
