Читать книгу They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper - Bruce Robinson - Страница 7

There is an aphorism. When you see a giant, make sure it isn’t a dwarf standing in a favourable light. Thus we approach ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’.

He’s in a house of smoke and shifting mirrors. There are glimpses of amorphous faces. Many Jack the Rippers are in here, feeding off what historical fragments their keeper can throw into the pit.

Middle-aged men with disturbing expressions lean over the safety rail, clutching files. These are the Ripperologists. They are waiting for the Rippers to come out.

‘There he is!’ bellows one. ‘It’s the wall-eyed onanist from Zadonsk! Look at him, he’s playing with himself! Can’t you see him? He’s got a satchel of wombs!’

Nobody can see him. Attention migrates to another man, and he’s just seen somebody else. ‘There, there,’ he barks, shuffling his Metropolitan Police files. ‘The Jew! The Jew!! Mark the Jew!!’

An inflamed, bespectacled authority fights his way to the front. ‘Shut this farce down!’ he demands. ‘You are all duped!’ He struggles to get a pedometer past a pack of egg sandwiches. ‘I’ve measured his routes,’ he charges, thrusting his instrument as proof. ‘I challenge you all with the routes!’

Insults begin to fly, and argument breaks out between him and a man with a compass. But the lights have already started to dim, and the shutters have gone up. It’s time for the Ripperologists to go home and save their arguments for another day.

This book has no interest in the house of mirrors, and despite selective admiration for some, no interest in Ripperologists. I don’t believe this collective could catch the object of its aspiration in a thousand years, and furthermore, I don’t believe in ‘the mystery of Jack the Ripper’ either.

We all know the story, at least the blurb on the paperbacks.

It is the autumn of 1888. The cobbled streets of Whitechapel echo to the chilling footsteps of a ruthless killer … Out of the foetid darkness came this subhuman nemesis of blood-hungry evil. Taunting the frantic police, he visited merciless death on five desperate women, nothing to speak as his witness but their hideously mutilated remains. He left no clue, but went as silently as he came, leaving nothing but a name that will forever be etched into the annals of criminal infamy: ‘Jack the Ripper’. Ah! Jack the Ripper. (Fog to taste.)

This book is a repudiation of virtually everything Ripperology has ever written. Anyone who wishes is welcome to have their Ripper back, and retire with him to the nearest gaslit alley. I tend towards a cynical point of view. In politics I expect the worst, and usually get it. But I had no idea of what I was in for with this. Buried in the ‘mystery’ of the Ripper atrocities is a scandal that ain’t much short of incredible. Exploring it was like pulling at a small, wizened root that as it disinters is discovered to be connected to an enormous root-system, deeper and more protectively concealed than I could ever have imagined.

I’ve spent rather a while enquiring into this ‘mystery’, and incrementally I have learned to loathe much of what was the Victorian governing class. Wealth was a deity in Victorian England, and everything was subservient to the maintenance of it. Underpinned by their ‘right to rule’, their cupidity and institutionalised hypocrisy, these defects constituted a potent amalgamation of the forces that conspired to turn this monster into a ‘mystery’.

There’s a perverse, almost heroic status that has evolved around this prick, as though he were someone special, rather than the epitome of all that is cruel, and a God-damned repugnance. His only claim to the extraordinary is his anonymity, his so-called ‘mystery’; and even that doesn’t belong to him, but was the gift of others.

There’s a hybrid of Ripperology responsible for a dizzying variety of publications over the last half-century. By a process of attrition and endless industry, this coterie of authors has come to ‘own’ this history. They are self-appointed ‘experts’ and guardians of flat-earth thinking. Under constrictions of the herd (and by some by design) they have constructed a formidable camouflage around this criminal. It is necessary to break through it before there is any possibility of discovering the identity of our Victorian psychopath.

Busting Jack entails an unravelling of the root-system that is way beyond the constipated strictures of Ripperology.

During the Second World War there was an interrogator for Army Counter-Intelligence by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto. It was his task to break the cover of enemy spies, and he’s one of my weirder heroes. In 1942 Pinto had a man at the other side of his desk who instinct told him had to be an enemy agent. Before arriving at the Colonel’s office (just off The Strand in central London), this suspect had been through many searing investigations and survived them all. Notwithstanding that, the authorities continued to harbour suspicions; but nobody could break him. So what did Pinto think?

Pinto interrogated his man over a period of days. The suspect had an impeccable Oxford accent, excellent socio-geographic knowledge, backed up by documentation that was as good as it gets. Down to the last little parochial nuance, he had an answer for everything, and seemed totally and utterly kosher.

Even so, Pinto was convinced he was dealing with an exceptionally talented spy whose true provenance was Berlin. But he couldn’t crack him, so he invited him out to lunch. Ten minutes later they were walking up The Strand, about to cross it to go to the chosen restaurant when, as they stepped off the kerb, Pinto screamed, ‘Look out!’ – and he got his German because the bastard looked the wrong way.

‘We drive on the left in England, old boy.’

That is an expert in action. In that one inspired moment, all the lies, all the carefully contrived subterfuge, and all the mystery fell to bits. I’m afraid my narrative will take rather longer to make its point than that flash of inspiration from Pinto. But I believe that the Ripper is just as vulnerable. Nailing this aberration means looking beyond the masquerade and requires but a single word. So look out, Jack! We’re stepping off the kerb, and I’m going to bust your arse.

B.R.

2 May 2015