It was as if the killer had been disturbed on the first kill, and was so enraged, he determined to find another at all costs. Poor Kate Eddowes took full force; he slashed her throat, made a huge gash across her right cheek which severed the tip of her nose and part of her right earlobe – these tumbled out of her clothes when they were removed at the morgue – sliced her open from rectum to breastbone, and disembowelled her in a frenzy, pulling her entrails from her, tossing them over her shoulder and leaving them in a jellied heap on the pavement.
By late evening, Sarah was bringing back tales of a surge in the heckling and goading of Jews on the streets, and even some attacks. Mobs had been heard chanting ‘Down with the Jews’. I wondered how Dr Shivershev would feel about that, if a privileged and educated Jewish man like him would feel the same fear as the sweated Jew on the street must, or if like us women, Jews relied on there being a lesser kind of themselves to play the scapegoat. The police were clearly no closer to finding the perpetrator and one of the letters pages printed a solution that had me in fits of giggles: The police should be given noiseless boots so they can sneak up on the Whitechapel fellow.
The real breakthrough came when an eyewitness emerged. Israel Schwartz, a Hungarian Jew, had been walking down Berner Street at around the time Liz Stride was presumed to have been murdered. I pored over the descriptions, read them again and again, pictured Israel Schwartz in all his terror and wrote him into my little drama to try and fathom it better. Though Schwartz reported what he saw the police, the public called him a ‘hen-hearted coward’, for not intervening. I thought that a harsh judgement, what men stopped other men from beating their wives? No one called them cowards. Schwartz said he’d seen a man and a woman having an argument – the man being of medium height and broad shouldered and with dark hair, a full face and a small moustache. And there was a second man too – tall, at around five foot eleven, with brown hair, a moustache and a dark overcoat. There was no getting away from it: when I read these words, I saw Thomas and Dr Shivershev.
*
When Thomas eventually came home that evening, I waited for the truth to come out, but there was nothing. No explosion of outrage from him about the details of all that I’d shared, in confidence, with Dr Shivershev. No admission, even, that he’d met with Dr Shivershev. The uncertainty and disingenuousness was driving me insane. I was convinced I had seen the two of them together in the Princess Alice and yet now I doubted myself. I wondered why I continued with my inaction, when everything, every clue and warning, was telling me to run. What was I waiting for?
The reality was, I still thought my fate unchangeable, as I always had. I had made plays at a career as a nurse, and then as a wife, but I carried the fear that I had no real place as either. I had to assume this was why I had found both so difficult to make successful. I had whipped up an ambition that didn’t belong to me, forced my way into a profession I didn’t suit and found a husband that shouldn’t be mine. I had set out consciously to trap someone I thought I could manage and now I was the fool who was trapped. All I could do was wait, resigned to the inevitable end.
This was a story with an ending that had been written long ago. I had merely managed to defer it the first time. I somehow knew all along that I would meet my end at the hands of a violent man. Why else would the man with the gold tooth keep visiting me in my dreams? There was no point running, because wherever I went, I carried him with me.
The man with the gold tooth had at one point merely been one of the many men in my mother’s bed. I would hide under the bed in our room in the Nichol when he came to visit, as I did with all of them.
That night, I’d kept quiet as a mouse, as I’d been taught, even as the bed shook with my mother and the man above me. At first the noises had made sense – the rhythm, the business of fucking – but then my mother started to make strange gaspings and gurglings, and the bed jumped and bowed, almost touching my face. I lay there willing the floor to swallow me up.
My mother’s white foot twitched in the way I’d seen a chicken twitch when its neck was broken. I was five years old and more scared than I’d ever been. I wet myself. The piss began trickling down my leg, but, young as I was, I knew I mustn’t let it pool on the floor and betray me. The man must not find out that I was there. I stuffed my fingers under
