A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper Page 16

  It seemed to take an age to hoist myself out of bed, into the bathroom, and dress, finally managing to make my way to the kitchen, where I drank copious cups of coffee, and four slices of toast. I wasn't particularly hungry, but I thought the food might help to counteract the after-effects of the sleeping tablets.

  I switched the radio on as I ate, and waited to hear the eight o'clock news. When it came, the report on the local murders stated the police had made an arrest! 'Acting on information received', a twenty-five year old man had been arrested at his home late the previous night, probably while I'd slept. I was glad that at least the streets of Guildford and the surrounding villages, mine included, were safe for the time being, presuming of course that the police had nabbed the right man. Perhaps my own disturbing emotions might now subside; no more murders in my town would surely mean no more grisly coincidences.

  As the news came to an end I was disturbed by a loud knocking at the front door. Still feeling quite groggy, I walked slowly from the kitchen to the door, and peered through the security porthole. Standing outside were a uniformed police constable and another man dressed in a blue suit. Wondering what on earth the police were doing at my house, I unlocked and opened the door.

  "Doctor Cavendish?

  "Yes?" I replied, questioningly.

  "I'm Inspector Bell; this is Constable Tenant, Surrey police. Could we come in for a few minutes please?"

  "What's this about, Inspector?" I asked.

  "I'd rather discuss that inside if we may, doctor."

  "Right, well, you'd better come in then, hadn't you?" I replied rather ungraciously. My head still throbbed, and my tongue had barely resumed its normal functions within my ultra-dry mouth. The last thing I needed was an unexpected visit from the local constabulary.

  I led the two officers into the kitchen, and bade them sit down.

  "Now, inspector, what's this all about?"

  "Well doctor, you may have heard about the two murders that took place in town two nights ago?"

  The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly stood to attention.

  "Yes, of course, but what has that to do with me?"

  "Well, sir, you may also have heard that we picked a suspect up late last night. It just so happens that he claims to be one of your patients."

  At that, my heart almost missed a beat, and I could swear to this day that my pulse rate virtually doubled. Certainly the thumping in my head increased, I thought the policemen must surely be able to see the pulse in my temple visibly throbbing, though they obviously couldn't.

  "Go on, inspector," I gulped.

  "His name is John Terence Ross, his own mother called us when she saw blood on his shoes and on his trouser hems after he'd gone to bed last night. Seems he's had a history of psychiatric disorder for some time, and as I said he and his mother claim you're his psychiatrist."

  "It's true I've seen him a few times, his mother paid for him to see me when the doctors at the Farnham Road hospital seemed unable to make much progress with him."

  "What can you tell us about his illness doctor?"

  "Come now, inspector," I replied, "you know I can't breach doctor/patient confidentiality."

  "I know that, of course, but I thought that maybe you could come down to the station on Margaret Road, maybe talk to him, see if you can get him to talk to us, he's been virtually silent so far."

  "Has he told you anything?" I asked.

  "Only that he did it, and that they deserved to die. If he needs psychiatric help, we need to know exactly what we're dealing with."

  "All right, inspector," I sighed. "Give me an hour and I'll drive into town to see him."

  "That will be fine, sir; I'll be there at the station to meet you. Just ask for me at the desk."

  This couldn't be happening! Yet it was. After the police officers left the house I sat in the fireside chair in the kitchen, my mind racing, my head throbbing, and my hands, my whole body in fact, shaking like a leaf. The mirror image with my great-grandfather's situation stared at me with grim reality. How could such a series of events have conspired to happen at just such a time? Like great-grandfather, here I was being summoned to examine a man I knew, who could well be the murderer of two innocent women. Unlike my ancestor however, this time the man was in custody, though that did little to alleviate the feeling of impossible coincidence. John Ross was indeed a disturbed individual, though I wouldn't have thought him capable of such a heinous double crime. His medication should have served to keep him psychologically stable, if he'd taken it as prescribed, which perhaps he hadn't!

  Not only that, but a strange and unsettling thought suddenly leaped into my brain, striking home like a lightening bolt. His name, well, not so much his name as his initials. They'd never meant anything to me before, why should they? All of a sudden however, John Trevor Ross became JTR, easily translated into 'Jack the Ripper'.

  The drive to the police station took me about half an hour, but it felt like hours as I drove in a state of fugue, barely aware of who I was or what I was doing. I certainly had no idea what I would achieve by talking to John Ross, other than to further confuse and disturb my own increasingly fragile grip on reality. I couldn't tell the police that, could I?

  I parked in the visitors section, entered the station, and reported to the reception desk. I identified myself and asked for Inspector Bell, who arrived a minute later and led me through a door, down a corridor and into an interview room where I came face to face with John Trevor Ross.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  "Welcome Home, Robert"

  John Ross looked quite a pitiful creature sitting at the table in the interview room. His solicitor, Miles Burrows, sat beside him, with Inspector Bell beckoning me to sit next to himself on the opposite side of the table. A police sergeant was also present in the room to operate the tape recorder which was used to record the interview and was now a part of standard police procedure.

  Ross's clothes had been taken away for forensic examination. He was dressed in a simple one-piece boiler-suit type garment provided by the police. He was the smallest man in the room, though his size belied a sinewy strength gained from many hours spent working out at his local gymnasium. I had held four consultations with him in recent months, and diagnosed him as suffering from a mild schizophrenia, with a latent tendency towards violent behaviour. The medication I had prescribed for him, and which his mother had promised to ensure he took regularly, should have regulated his behaviour and enabled him to live a reasonably normal life. Obviously, things hadn't gone according to plan, and Ross's illness was far more serious than I had perhaps perceived. Unfortunately, schizophrenics can be highly adept at hiding their symptoms from their doctor, and it seemed John Ross was no exception.

  Though I wouldn't reveal any of my patient's medical details to the police at this stage, I did my best to encourage Ross to talk to the inspector, to try to explain to him why he'd done what he'd done. I was no more successful then the police themselves had been. Despite assuring him that I, and the police, wanted to help him, he refused to co-operate with his questioners. I knew when his case came to court he would probably face a life sentence, to be served in a secure institution, yet I could have felt a little sympathy for him if he'd only opened up to someone. Even an illogical, insane explanation for his actions would have been preferable to his sullen silence.

  I left the police station after almost two hours, two of the most depressing hours of my life. Ross's rigid stare, his silence, and the feeling that the police could somehow see straight through me to my own internal disturbances made me want to run from the place as though I were the criminal, as opposed to the man in the white boiler suit.

  On arriving home, I unlocked the front door, entered the hallway, quickly locked it again, and sagged against the door, my back against its solid oak panels. The house felt cold and I shivered. Perhaps I was shaking rather than shivering, by then it had become difficult to tell one from the other.

  I made my way to the
study. I'd lost valuable time by visiting the police station, and I wanted to complete my exploration of the Ripper's world before Sarah returned in a day or two. It wouldn't do to have her exposed to the strange phenomenon that was the journal itself, or for her to see me in this state of heightened anxiety, bordering on panic.

  I opened the study door, (I couldn't remember closing it when I left), and peered across the room towards my desk. The journal lay exactly where I'd left it, but as I looked at it I could have sworn that I'd heard a hushed whisper from within the room, and that the pages themselves were moving, gently rising and falling, as though infused with life, breathing softly on the desk. That was nonsense I told myself quickly, the movement was obviously stirred by the draught I'd caused by opening the door, and the sound was just my imagination. Rooms didn't whisper nor journals breathe, did they?

  Despite the early hour, I poured myself a small whisky I felt I deserved. I sat in my chair once more, and reached out for the journal. It took quite an effort to stop my hands from shaking, but the warm pages of the Ripper's secret confession were soon in my hands again.

  He had omitted to make any entries for three days since the 1st October, and the next entry, dated the 5th October was surprising in its literacy and in the revealingly chilling message it carried. Written like his letter to the press in red ink, with word-perfect spelling and punctuation, it read:

  5th October 1888

  Blood, beautiful, thick, rich, red, venous blood.

  Its' colour fills my eyes, its' scent assaults my nostrils,

  Its taste hangs sweetly on my lips.

  Last night once more the voices called to me,

  And I did venture forth, their bidding, their unholy quest to undertake.

  Through mean, gas lit, fog shrouded streets, I wandered in the night, selected, struck, with flashing blade,

  And oh, how the blood did run, pouring out upon the street, soaking through the cobbled cracks, spurting, like a fountain of pure red.

  Viscera leaking from ripped red gut, my clothes assumed the smell of freshly butchered meat. The squalid, dark, street shadows beckoned, and under leaning darkened eaves, like a wraith I disappeared once more into the cheerless night,

  The bloodlust of the voices again fulfilled, for a while.......

  They will call again, and I once more will prowl the streets upon the night,

  The blood will flow like a river once again.

  Beware all those who would stand against the call,

  I shall not be stopped or taken, no, not I.

  Sleep fair city, while you can, while the voices within are still,

  I am resting, but my time shall come again. I shall rise in a glorious bloodfest,

  I shall taste again the fear as the blade slices sharply through yielding flesh,

  when the voices raise the clarion call, and my time shall come again.

  So I say again, good citizens, sleep, for there will be a next time...........

  Any doubts I may have harboured about the Ripper having been an educated man were dispelled by this horrendously gloating entry. He had written almost poetically of his crimes, and this one entry, perhaps more than any other so far, gave me a vivid and terrible insight into the mind of the notorious Whitechapel murderer. I presumed he'd written it immediately after the night of the double murder, (though I supposed it could have been written after any of the murders), and transferred it to his journal later. His reference to making his escape 'under leaning darkened eaves' did, however, bring to my mind a picture of the yard in Berner street from which he'd so narrowly escaped detection. His illness was now plain to see, his mind probably beginning to finally give way under the weight of his appalling crimes. Having killed two women in one night, and with the mutilations and atrocities against his victims' bodies growing in ferocity with each murder, I knew that he was approaching a point where the sheer immensity and horror of his own wrong-doing would eventually overflow and lead to a massive breakdown. Though it was over three weeks away, I knew in my heart and mind that the murder of Mary Kelly, probably the most vicious and visually horrifying of the Ripper murders, had probably 'sent him over the edge', and that whatever came afterwards, hopefully to be explained either by the Ripper himself or in my great-grandfathers notes, would prove that final deterioration beyond a doubt, and reveal the reason for the Rippers' disappearance after the date of Kelly's murder. After all, there had been no arrest, no rumours of a strong suspect, and the murderer had simply seemed to fade away, back into the darkness from which he'd come, never to be heard from again. Why?

  The journal was getting thinner. I knew the final answers couldn't be far away, and as I sat reading and re-reading the latest terrible entry, I was once again gripped by an inexplicable tension and a fear that I may not be prepared for what I was about to learn.

  This last poetic entry had said that he was 'resting'. Was it a conscious and deliberate ploy on his part to disappear from view, escape the public's attentions before perpetrating his last and most gruesome killing? He'd written that the voices themselves had left him for the moment; that they, too, were at rest. It was clear that the voices were his motivation for the killings, 'thebloodlust of the voices again fulfilled' his own control over his actions by then were severely diminished, and his mind, close to its final descent into insanity was in need of time to recuperate, to regain a degree of normality, in order for him to plan and execute his next, and ultimately his last appearance on the streets of Whitechapel.

  As I replaced the journal on the desk I found myself asking when my great-grandfather would make another 'appearance' in the journal. Would there be any further notes inserted into the pages of the Rippers words, or would I have to wait until the end in order to decipher whatever secret had been held so closely in the family for so long? Surely, the identity of the Ripper was there, waiting to be revealed to me when I reached that last page, the last note. Not only that, but my family's involvement, however small, must be there. How I resisted the temptation to flip through to the end at that point I don't know, but something stopped me doing so. I had to continue as I was, page by page, reading about and 'seeing' the horrors of the murders as they happened, before I could be allowed to witness the final revelations of the journal.

  My head had begun to throb once more as I realised that the Ripper had made no reference to laudanum in the last entry. Had he weaned himself off it? Surely not. Perhaps he was by now so used to taking it that he considered it irrelevant to include in his journal. More likely, his addiction was such that he barely knew he was taking the drug; it had become a part of his every day life, a part of him! Had the headaches stopped? Maybe I'd find out in the next entry. He certainly must have been fairly lucid and in control of himself to write that last macabre entry. I was so full of questions and devoid of any answers that my own senses were reeling.

  I felt as though a gust of wind had suddenly swept through the room, and I turned to see where it could have come from. There was nothing, no open windows, and no doors that could admit such a gust. With the irrational fear that I was alone, yet not alone growing in intensity in my own overloaded mind, I raised myself from the chair, left the study, and began a search of the house.

  There was no-one there, of course there wasn't, the house was empty, and I chided myself for my foolishness. I returned to the study, and as I walked in through the door, I swear that once again, those damned pages were rising and falling, and that the room whispered a welcome to me as I sat in the comfortable leather chair, and reached out to the journal.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Russian Roulette

  The light of day quickly faded, the sky turning a dirty autumn grey as I turned the next page. Instead of the hand of the Ripper, the next thing I saw was another note from my great-grandfather, once again neatly tucked in-between two of the journal's pages. Perhaps now, I thought, the whole thing might begin to make sense. This note was undated, though its content was plain enough. The Ripper h
ad suffered another amnesiac seizure!

  Great-grandfather had added a note across the top of the paper, scripted by a different pen, in darker ink, obviously written on a later date than his original writings. The note read:

  Had I known later the true nature of what I now know to be fact, I guarantee to any who may read this that my actions would have been wholly different. I apologize for my short-sightedness, my stupidity, my rank failure to see what lay before my eyes.

  Note by Doctor Burton Cleveland Cavendish, November 1888.

  Once again I have been called to attend upon this sad pathetic young man. He has allowed his life to be destroyed by not just one, but two unfortunate addictions! Despite having had a decent, God fearing upbringing, with many of the advantages denied to so many in our society, he has led a dissolute existence. It appears he has been too fond of visiting those poor unfortunates who inhabit the dark streets of our metropolis, and suffers from that vile disease so often associated with men who avail themselves of such women. He is in the terminal phase of the illness, and insanity is not far away I fear, though for now, I consider that he may live as he does, alone in his home, without recourse to hospitalization. In addition, I fear that he may have taken my previous advice too literally, and had developed an addiction for the laudanum, which I had suggested he take to alleviate the symptoms of his headaches, though at the time I gave such advice I was not privy to his deeper problems.

  He is languishing once again in the day ward of the Charing Cross hospital, having been sent there once more after being found in a state of near collapse in the street. He appears to know nothing of how he came to be there, and was pleased to see me. I thanked Malcolm for sending for me once more, as I would not have wished a stranger to have perhaps requested that he be confined to the asylum, as surely he would never have exited from such a place, once admitted. His mother, surely would never have wanted to see him in his current position, it would have broken her heart, as it would do to see him in the pitiful state in which he now lies.