The Study In Red Trilogy

2. The Journal Begins

Foregoing the temptation to top up my by now half empty glass of whisky, (I’d decided a clear head would be imperative as I read the journal), I paused only long enough to ensure that both the front and back doors of the house were securely locked. Though not expecting any visitors this late in the afternoon, I wanted to ensure that no-one could walk in unannounced, and there was always Mrs Armitage from next door. She’d promised to ‘keep an eye’ on me for Sarah while she was away, and had developed the habit of knocking and entering before descending upon me with a plate of home-made scones or cakes or some other ‘treat’ she was sure I’d enjoy whilst on my own. Slightly overweight, a widow with more money than she could cheerfully spend, she appeared to want to alleviate her own personal boredom by ‘cheering me up’, as she put it. Not today thank you, Mrs Armitage!

Though I was sorely tempted, I resisted the urge to take the telephone off the hook, or to switch off my mobile. Sarah might try to call me, and, if she didn’t get a reply, I was sure she’d call Mrs Armitage and send her scurrying round to check on poor lonely little me! No, leave the phones on, safer by far.

I settled myself down once again in my chair and turned to the journal. I’ve referred to it as such because that’s the way my father, and my great-grandfather referred to it, but, in truth, it wasn’t so much a journal, as a collection of papers, punctured with a crude hole punch over a hundred years ago, and then bound together with tightly drawn tapes, or, perhaps, very stiff ribbons. After the passage of years it was hard to be sure what they were originally, and, after all, I’m a doctor, not an expert on antique book bindings.

There was no cover as such and no identifying title or name on the first page, but there were other sheets of paper protruding at various parts of the journal, (my great-grandfather’s additional notes, I surmised, I’d read them as I got to them). “Jack the Ripper”, I thought to myself, surely there was no-one in the civilized world who hadn’t heard of the famed Whitechapel murderer, and here I was, about to be taken, perhaps too closely, into that dark world of shadows and brutality inhabited by that most infamous of serial killers, and yet, as I began to read that first, aged and wrinkled page I was convinced that my father and those before him had fallen for the literary rantings of a madman.

The journal began:

6th August 1888,

6th August 1888,

Ate a fine dinner, red wine, (blood), the tenderest veal, rare, (more blood), and the voices hissing at me through the gas mantle, the lights flickering, screaming, and ringing in my head. Blood! Let the streets run red with the harlots blood; avenge the pitiful wrecks brought to foul disease by the tainted blood. Spill the blood, the streets are mine, the blood shall be mine, they will know me, fear me, I am justice, I am death! What foul pestilence they spread, and I shall cause to die such evil that men shall raise my name on high! I hear the voices, they sing to me, ah, such sweet melodies, and always red, they sing of red, of w****s and their foul-smelling wicked entrails, that I shall put aside forever.

Ate a fine dinner, red wine, (blood), the tenderest veal, rare, (more blood), and the voices hissing at me through the gas mantle, the lights flickering, screaming, and ringing in my head. Blood! Let the streets run red with the harlots blood; avenge the pitiful wrecks brought to foul disease by the tainted blood. Spill the blood, the streets are mine, the blood shall be mine, they will know me, fear me, I am justice, I am death! What foul pestilence they spread, and I shall cause to die such evil that men shall raise my name on high! I hear the voices, they sing to me, ah, such sweet melodies, and always red, they sing of red, of w****s and their foul-smelling wicked entrails, that I shall put aside forever.

The cheese was a little over-ripe, though the cigar my friend left on his last visit went admirably well with the after-dinner port. Very relaxed as I sat enjoying faint warmth of the evening.

The cheese was a little over-ripe, though the cigar my friend left on his last visit went admirably well with the after-dinner port. Very relaxed as I sat enjoying faint warmth of the evening.

I hear the voices, and I must reply, but the only reply they want to hear is the sound of death, the drenching of blood on stone, yes, they need me, I am the instrument of fear, red, red blood, running like a river, I see it, I can almost taste it, I must go, the night will be upon me soon, and the cigar smoke hangs like a fog in the room. My, but the port is good, I swill it round the glass, and it is the blood, the blood that will flow as I begin my work, such fine port, such a good night for killing.

I hear the voices, and I must reply, but the only reply they want to hear is the sound of death, the drenching of blood on stone, yes, they need me, I am the instrument of fear, red, red blood, running like a river, I see it, I can almost taste it, I must go, the night will be upon me soon, and the cigar smoke hangs like a fog in the room. My, but the port is good, I swill it round the glass, and it is the blood, the blood that will flow as I begin my work, such fine port, such a good night for killing.

***

***

7th August 1888

7th August 1888

‘Twas a fine clear night for the job to be done. Had no real good tools to work with, kitchen and carving knives, very poor show. The w***e was waiting, eager, needing me. So gullible as to invite me indoors, did her on the first-floor landing, started and couldn’t stop. She was so surprised, oh yes, her face, that look, pure terror as the knife slashed into her softly yielding flesh. First one straight to the heart, she staggered, fell, and we set about the work. I say we, for the voices were there with me, guiding, watching, slashing and cutting with me. Lost count of the number of times I cut the w***e, she didn’t even scream, just a low gurgling as she expired in the dark. Took care to purify the w***e’s breasts, her gut, her vital parts. She’ll spread no pestilence no more, the river ran red, as they promised it would. I must take care the next time; there was too much blood upon my self. Lucky man, to have thought to remove my coat before I began, had to burn a perfectly good jacket and fine trousers this morning. Though no-one saw me when I left, it was a messy job, I’ll get good tools the next time, better clothes for the job.

‘Twas a fine clear night for the job to be done. Had no real good tools to work with, kitchen and carving knives, very poor show. The w***e was waiting, eager, needing me. So gullible as to invite me indoors, did her on the first-floor landing, started and couldn’t stop. She was so surprised, oh yes, her face, that look, pure terror as the knife slashed into her softly yielding flesh. First one straight to the heart, she staggered, fell, and we set about the work. I say we, for the voices were there with me, guiding, watching, slashing and cutting with me. Lost count of the number of times I cut the w***e, she didn’t even scream, just a low gurgling as she expired in the dark. Took care to purify the w***e’s breasts, her gut, her vital parts. She’ll spread no pestilence no more, the river ran red, as they promised it would. I must take care the next time; there was too much blood upon my self. Lucky man, to have thought to remove my coat before I began, had to burn a perfectly good jacket and fine trousers this morning. Though no-one saw me when I left, it was a messy job, I’ll get good tools the next time, better clothes for the job.

It was a good start though, of that I’m sure, and there’ll be more, so many more!

It was a good start though, of that I’m sure, and there’ll be more, so many more!I had to stop and take a breath. Surely these were the ravings of a total lunatic! There was a clarity of thought evident in certain parts of the text, an almost urbane banality in the references to relaxing with a cigar, the warmth of the evening, and the casual references to getting ‘better tools next time’. Then the almost unbelievable savagery of expression in the description of the death of that poor woman. Though short, it was terrifying, chilling, the work surely of a man devoid of reason or conscience. Even though these crimes had taken place over a century ago, the first pages of the journal filled me with a fear and dread as real as if I’d been there in London in 1888.

Though not a phrase we like to use in these enlightened times, I had to think in terms of the times in which these crimes took place, and I thought that this couldn’t be right. Jack the Ripper, from what little I knew, had been clever, a master of concealment and bravado, these words couldn’t be those of the Ripper, surely not! These were the words of a seriously disturbed individual, which, though the Ripper also had to have been similarly deranged, seemed to belong more in the realms of fantasy than reality. Could the writer have written this journal after the event, and, as many deluded souls have done through the years, imagined himself to be the notorious murderer. In other words, could this have been written by a seriously ill, delusional individual seeking to gain attention?

My own knowledge of the Jack the Ripper murders was scant at best, so, before continuing, I fired up my computer, and accessed the internet. There, I found a welter of sites offering information and speculation on the Ripper murders, and, I quickly printed off a couple of informative pieces, in the hope that they would be able to give me some useful points of reference as I progressed through what I thought of as the madman’s journal lying on the desk before me.

Sure enough, there it was. In the early hours of the morning of the 7th August 1888, the body of Martha Tabram had been discovered on a first-floor landing of a tenement building at 37 George Yard. In total 39 stab wounds were discovered on her body, the majority of the damage having been caused to her breasts, belly, and private parts. It seems that, as the Ripper murders progressed, the killing of Martha Tabram was discounted by some as having been committed by the same man who killed the other, later victims. If my lunatic, (as I thought of him at the moment) had indeed been Jack the Ripper, then it was plain to see that Martha Tabram had perhaps been his first, tentative venture into the world of bloody murder. At this time however, the police and the public had no inkling of the c*****e that was waiting in the wings, preparing to unleash itself upon the streets of Whitechapel. Of course, in 1888 forensic science was non-existent, the use of fingerprints for identification was still many years in the future, and the police were, in the case of poor Martha Tabram, virtually clueless. At the time of her death Martha was 39 years old, the estranged wife of Henry Tabram, and had spent the last nine years living on and off with a William Turner, who last saw her alive on the 4th of August, when he gave her the sum of 1/6d (71/2p). On the night of her death various witnesses stated that she’s been seen in the company of one of more soldiers, and the original police theory was that she may have been murdered by a soldier ‘client’.

Unfortunately, the murder of one ‘shilling w***e’ raised scant headlines in the press or in the public conscience at the time. All that was soon to change!

I decided at that point that I needed a strategy, a means of working through the journal, whilst ensuring that I maintained a grip on the realities of the case. How easy it would have been to skip straight to the end, to read my great-grandfather’s final notes, to see if the Ripper was identified, either by his own words, if true, or by great-grandfather. I’d never known him, he’d died before I was born, but I’d learned enough about him to know that he was a highly respected physician in his day, and I was sure that his conclusions would be a revelation in themselves. No, I couldn’t do it. I had to read each page in order, had to assimilate the information in chronological order in order to understand what this was all about. It wasn’t just the Ripper, no, my great-grandfather was also nursing some other secret, and, before I read what it was, I needed to understand what had happened to lead to his final solution, whatever that had been.

I presumed that the journal would take me on a journey, a journey through the terrible events that took place back in 1888, so I decided that the best course of action would be to read the journal, referring to any notes made by my great-grandfather, and then to refer to the texts I had printed from the internet, checking the facts as I went. In fact, I took the time to find more websites, and printed out reams of information on the murders, and it was quite some time before, having collated them all into a working chronology, I settled myself once more into my chair, took another sip of whisky, and slowly reached out to take up the journal once more.