The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw. Felix J. Palma
plan could wait. Sprawled over the bench, trying hard to prevent his mind from elaborating the simplest thought, Andrew let the day go by, his numbness increasing as he drew closer to the edge of oblivion.
But he was not too dazed to respond to the cry of a newspaper vendor. ‘Read all about it in the Star] Special edition: Jack the Ripper caught!’
Andrew leaped to his feet. The Ripper caught? He could hardly believe his ears. He leaned out of the window and, screwing up his eyes, scoured the street until he glimpsed a boy selling newspapers on a corner. He beckoned him over and bought a copy from him through the window. With trembling hands, he cleared away several bottles and spread the newspaper on the table. He had not misheard. ‘Jack the Ripper Caught!’ the headline declared. Reading the article proved slow and frustrating, due to his drunken state, but with patience and much blinking, he managed to decipher what was written.
The article began by declaring that Jack the Ripper had committed his last ever crime the previous night. His victim was a prostitute of Welsh origin called Marie Jeanette Kelly, discovered in the room she rented in Miller’s Court, at number twenty-six Dorset Street. Andrew skipped the following paragraph, which listed in gory detail the gruesome mutilations the murderer had perpetrated on her, and went straight to the description of his capture.
The newspaper stated that less than an hour after he had committed the heinous crime, the murderer who had terrorised the East End for four months had been caught by George Lusk and his men. Apparently, a witness who preferred to remain anonymous had heard Marie Kelly’s screams and alerted the Vigilance Committee. Unhappily, they reached Miller’s Court too late, but had managed to corner the Ripper as he fled down Middlesex Street. At first, the murderer tried to deny his guilt, but soon gave up after he was searched and the still warm heart of his victim was found in one of his pockets. The man’s name was Bryan Reese, and he worked as a cook on a merchant vessel, the Slip, which had docked at the Port of London from Barbados the previous July and would be setting sail for the Caribbean the following week.
During his interrogation by Frederick Abberline, the detective in charge of the investigation, Reese had confessed to the five murders of which he was accused, and had even shown his satisfaction at having been able to execute his final bloody act in the privacy of a room with a nice warm fire. He was tired of always having to kill in the street. ‘I knew I was going to follow that whore the moment I saw her,’ the murderer had gloated, before going on to claim he had murdered his own mother, a prostitute like his victims, as soon as he was old enough to wield a knife. This detail, which might have explained his behaviour, had yet to be confirmed.
Accompanying the article was a photogravure of the murderer so that Andrew could finally see the face of the man he had bumped into in the gloom of Hanbury Street. His appearance was disappointing. He was an ordinary-looking fellow, rather heavily built, with curly sideburns and a bushy moustache that drooped over his top Up. Despite his rather sinister smirk, which probably owed more to the conditions in which he had been photographed than anything else, Andrew had to admit he might just as well have been an honest baker as a ruthless killer. He certainly had none of the gruesome features Londoners’ imaginations had ascribed to him.
The following pages gave other related news items, such as the resignation of Sir Charles Warren following his acknowledgement of police incompetence in the case, or statements from Reese’s astonished fellow seamen on the cargo vessel, but Andrew already knew everything he wanted to know and went back to the front page. From what he could work out, he had entered Marie Kelly’s little room moments after the murderer had left and shortly before Lusk’s mob arrived, as if they were all keeping to a series of dance steps. He hated to think what would have happened had he delayed fleeing any longer and been discovered standing over Marie Kelly’s body by the Vigilance Committee. He had been lucky, he told himself.
He tore out the first page, folded it and put it into his jacket pocket, then ordered another bottle to celebrate that, although his heart was irreparably broken, he had escaped being beaten to a pulp by an angry mob.
Eight years later, Andrew took that same cutting from his pocket. Like him, it was yellowed with age. How often had he re-read it, recalling Marie Kelly’s horrific mutilations like a self-imposed penance? He had almost no other memories of the intervening years. What had he done during that time? It was difficult to say. He vaguely remembered Harold taking him home after scouring the various pubs in the vicinity and finding him passed out in that den. He had spent several days in bed with a fever, ranting and suffering from nightmares in which Marie Kelly’s corpse lay stretched out on her bed, her insides strewn about the room, or in which he was slitting her open with a huge knife while Reese looked on approvingly.
In a brief moment of clarity during his feverish haze, he was able to make out his father sitting stiffly on the edge of his bed, begging forgiveness for his behaviour. But it was easy to apologise now there was nothing to accept. Now all he had to do was join in the theatrical display of grief that the family, even Harold, had decided to put on for him as a mark of respect. Andrew waved his father away, with an impatient gesture that, to his annoyance, the proud William Harrington took to be absolution, judging from his smile of satisfaction as he left the room, as though he had sealed a successful deal. William Harrington had wanted to clear his conscience and that was what he had done, whether his son liked it or not. Now he could forget the matter and get back to business. Andrew did not really care: he and his father had never seen eye to eye and were not likely to do so now.
He recovered from his fever too late to attend Marie Kelly’s funeral, but not her killer’s execution. The Ripper was hanged at Wandsworth Prison, despite the objections of several doctors, who maintained Reese’s brain was worthy of scientific study: its bumps and folds must contain the crimes he had been predestined to commit since birth and should be recorded. Andrew watched as the executioner snuffed out Reese’s life but this did not bring back Marie Kelly’s or those of her fellow whores. Things did not work like that; the Creator knew nothing of bartering, only of retribution. At most, a child might have been born at the moment when the rope snapped the Ripper’s neck, but bringing back the dead to life was another matter. Perhaps that explained why so many had begun to doubt His power and even to question whether it was really He who had created the world.
That same afternoon, a spark from a lamp set alight the portrait of Marie Kelly hanging in the Winslows’ library. That, at least, was what Charles said – he had arrived just in time to put out the fire.
Andrew was grateful for Charles’s gesture, but the affair could not be ended by removing the cause. No, it was something that was impossible to deny. Thanks to his father’s generosity, Andrew got back his old life, but being reinstated as heir to the vast fortune his father and brother continued to amass meant nothing to him now. All that money could not heal the wound inside, although he soon realised that spending it in the opium dens of Poland Street helped. Too much drink had made him immune to alcohol, but opium was a far more effective and gentler aid to forgetting. Not for nothing had the ancient Greeks used it to treat a wide range of afflictions.
Andrew began to spend his days in the opium den, sucking his pipe as he lay on one of the hundreds of mattresses screened off by exotic curtains. In those rooms, lined with fly-blown mirrors that made their dimensions seem uncertain in the dim light cast by the gas lamps, Andrew fled his pain in the labyrinths of a shadowy, never-ending daydream. From time to time a skinny Malay filled his pipe bowl for him, until Harold or his cousin pulled back the curtain and led him out. If Coleridge had resorted to opium to alleviate the trifling pain of toothache, why should Andrew not use it to dull the agony of a broken heart, he replied, when Charles warned him of the dangers of addiction. As always his cousin was right, and although as his suffering abated Andrew stopped visiting the opium den, for a while he was obliged to carry phials of laudanum around with him.
That period lasted two or three years, until the pain finally disappeared, giving way to something far worse: emptiness, lethargy, numbness. Marie Kelly’s murder had obliterated his will to live, severed his unique communication with the world, leaving him deaf and dumb, manoeuvring him into a corner of the universe where nothing happened. He had turned into an automaton, a gloomy creature that lived out of habit, without hope, simply because life, real life, had no link to the way he spent