A Study in Red - The Secret Journal of Jack the Ripper Read online

  I felt a sudden terror and a shiver ran through my body as a thought shot to the forefront of my brain. In those last few seconds, as the realization of his thoughts had come to me I had suddenly felt as though I knew exactly what he'd been thinking when he'd tossed Mary Kelly's heart in that cart; for a few short seconds, I had actually sensed the thoughts that had run through the mind of Jack the Ripper.

  That couldn't be true of course, could it? At least, that's what I told myself, I was just being fanciful, I was tired, and more than a little disturbed by the effect the journal had had on me these last couple of days, that was all. After all, no-one could sense or feel the thoughts of a dead man, now could they?

  I looked up from the desk, it was now almost dark outside, the fog was like an impenetrable cloud, and I realised I was sitting in almost complete darkness in the study. I got up, turned the lights on, and returned to the desk. I couldn't stop now, I had to go on, I just had to.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  An End in Sight

  I now felt I was close to the conclusion of the terrible saga to which I'd been suddenly introduced by my own dead father. I kept asking myself the same question. Could it really be possible that Jack the Ripper had been born out of one man's insane desire to gain the recognition of the father he'd never known? The more I pondered on the question the more the answer became clearer. It was eminently possible, and I knew, as a psychiatrist, that the sick and diseased mind of an individual can easily take an idea and twist it until putting it into practice becomes totally logical to him or her.

  His lack of detail in describing the murder of Mary Kelly convinced me that the murder itself was almost superfluous to his real motive. The gathering severity of each crime now took on a different perspective, as though only by increasing the scale of brutality and mutilation could he hope to 'impress' his father.

  In fact the scene that greeted those who witnessed the aftermath of his 'work' at 13 Millers Court was so horrendous that grown men cried, were physically sick, and many later reported that the sight of her butchered corpse would live forever in their minds. Her clothes had been neatly placed on a chair beside her bed, leaving her naked and exposed. The room itself was like a charnel house, with blood on the walls, the floor, and almost every solid object. Butchery was almost too polite a word for what the Ripper had done to the poor girl's body. As I've described earlier in my report on the post mortem examination, he had literally cut her to pieces. Body parts were strewn around the room, though there was nothing haphazard about their distribution. He had quite carefully placed each piece of dismembered flesh or limb in precise locations, there was certainly no evidence that they'd been thrown in a frenzy or in a random way. Perhaps the thing that caused the most consternation in the minds of the officers attending the scene that morning was the quite appalling mutilation of the girl's face, there was almost nothing left of it, and scarcely enough to positively identify the unfortunate victim, though no-one was in any doubt that it was Mary Jane Kelly. Her upper legs had been almost totally denuded of flesh, and her heart was missing, perhaps the cruellest cut of all.

  Why then, did the Ripper choose to mention so little of this in his journal, if not for the fact that it meant so very little to him? I was sure that that was the reason, he just didn't care as such any more, and his voices would probably have told him that he'd done all they'd asked of him in order to justify his self to his father.

  Why did I feel as though I knew these things? Once again I felt as though his thoughts had become mine, as if his mind had somehow entered into a parallel existence with my own, allowing me, at a distance of over one hundred years, to see with perfect clarity the thoughts and machinations of his sick and deluded mind. Could a mere blood connection between us have caused such a thing to happen? The answer of course was no! I was becoming irrational and anxious myself, of that I was sure, though there seemed little I could do to stop myself from thinking and feeling those terrible thoughts.

  I needed to reach the end of the final page and discover whatever dark secrets might still be waiting for me in the words of the Ripper and of my great-grandfather.

  Weariness was creeping into every muscle, every sinew, and as much as I wanted to complete my strange expedition into the past sooner rather than later, I knew I needed a break. I left the study and instead of heading for the kitchen, I headed down the hall and opened the front door, intending to refresh myself in the cool night air. Night had by then fallen completely, the darkness compounded by the fog that hung around my house like a shroud. The sound-dampening effect of the fog gave an eerie feel to the night, and as I stood looking out from the threshold of the house, I could have sworn I could see strange ethereal shapes twisting and moving in the midst of that dark, grey-white cloud. There was a swish in the darkness, as though something had flown silently through the bank of fog, then I realised it was just the sound-deadened drone of an expensive and quiet car engine as a vehicle passed the entrance to the drive. The fog had brought an intense cold to the night, and I stood there shivering for a good five minutes as I attempted to gather my thoughts before returning to the study.

  I shut the door, and leaned against the oak panels, not moving until I began to feel a modicum of warmth returning to my body.

  I told myself that food would be a good idea, and actually entered the kitchen with that intention before deciding I was past the point of needing food, for this night anyway. I poured myself a large whisky, and carried the bottle and my glass with me on my return to my chair in the study, my window upon the world of the Ripper. Not wishing to starve myself completely, I also tucked under my arm a large packet of cheese biscuits, just in case the need to eat returned at some point in the night. So it was that I made myself comfortable once more and looked forward with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation to my third night in the company of Jack the Ripper. Would it provide me with satisfactory answers to the questions in my mind? Only time would tell, and time was a commodity beginning to run in short supply. After tonight, I had less than twenty four hours before Sarah returned.

  I admit I wasn't quite sure why, what effect it would have on her if she knew the truth about the journal, or even of its existence, but I did know that under no circumstances must Sarah ever see or know of the journal. It would place her at terrible risk, and again, I had no idea why, I just knew. What would I do with the journal when I'd finished it? Should I destroy it? Should I reseal it and lock it away in a safe, or lodge it with a solicitor as my father had done? Sarah and I had no children, so who would I leave it to if I decided to maintain the family secret and tradition? As soon as I asked myself the question I knew the answer, and as much as it saddened me to burden a future generation with the thing that lay on my desk in front of me, I knew exactly what I had to do.

  Deciding that to hesitate any longer would be futile, I made up my mind to plough on and try to disseminate the last few pages of the journal as quickly as I could. I poured another whisky; its amber liquid quickly warmed me as it slipped easily down my throat. I stretched my arms out as far as they would go, and flexed my feet to try to maintain a decent level of blood circulation. I intended to stay in my chair until I'd completed the task I'd set myself.

  The sad and monstrous tale of the life of Jack the Ripper had been forced upon me by the hand of my dead father. I could do nothing other than sit and read the self-confessions of the long dead progeny of my great-grandfather. If the soul of Jack the Ripper were indeed somehow locked within the pages of his infamous and ghastly journal, imprinted by the words written with his own murderous hand, then I was determined to be the one who finally put an end to the journal's influence over my family. A new determination rose within me, a sense of boldness and bravado that I could outwit the evil soul of my illegitimate ancestor, and ensure that his influence over our family was forever buried along with his own black heart, wherever that might be. Had I been able to see what was written on the concluding pages of the journal I might not
have been so sure of myself, but such of course, is the folly of mere mortal man.

  My hands reached out once more to lift the infernal journal of Jack the Ripper, and as I felt the strange and unearthly warmth of its pages once again, without warning, every light in the room went out and I was plunged into the ultimate psychological horror of total darkness!

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  A Single Voice, Crying in the Night

  The sudden descent into darkness played havoc with my increasingly fragile state of mind. I felt a surge of panic and twisted in my seat, fully expecting to see some glowing spectral figure hovering in the doorway, ready to whisk me off to the spirit world, or worse. I was like a child who wakes in the night, filled with dread from a nightmare, imaging monsters to be hiding under the bed, or snakes creeping from out of the walls, but of course, Dr Robert Cavendish didn't believe in monsters, now did I?

  I sat rooted to the spot, unable to raise myself from the chair for at least a minute, until the trembling in my frame began to subside, and rationality took over my mind. Logic dictated that one of two things had happened. Either a power cut had occurred, or a fuse had blown, taking the lights with it. I fumbled around in the dark until I managed to open the bottom drawer of my desk where I kept a small penlight torch, as I was always losing things behind the desk, and especially behind the computer hard-drive. The little torch had proved its worth many times in the past. At last my groping fingers made contact with its familiar shape amongst the drawer's contents.

  With a sense of relief it burst into life at the flick of the 'on' switch, and at least I had a sliver of light by which to negotiate my way to the fuse box under the stairs. Still slightly apprehensive, I set off, half-expecting to be waylaid by that spectral figure that lingered in the back of my mind, but I made it safely to the door under the stairs and spotted the cause of the problem. Something, a short circuit perhaps, had caused the main fuse to blow, and the circuit breaker had tripped and sent me plummeting into that surprisingly frightening darkness. As I pushed the switch on the circuit breaker back to its rightful position I was rewarded with a flood of light and relief washed over me like a tidal wave.

  Feeling quite foolish at having allowed myself to become so spooked by a simple thing like a blown fuse I made my way sheepishly into the kitchen, in need of coffee, and its stimulating properties. I switched on the radio as the kettle boiled and sitting at the table with the hot steaming mug in my hand the late evening news was broadcast by the local radio station. In a grim voice the newscaster was announcing that the suspect in case of the two local murders, John Trevor Ross, had been found hanging in his cell that afternoon. He had been declared dead on arrival at the hospital. In a further revelation it appeared that Ross's family had been connected by marriage to the family of one of the original suspects in the Jack the Ripper case over a hundred years earlier, though the police refused to release the family name connected with the case.

  I felt as though I'd been struck by a thunderbolt. I didn't hear another word as the newscaster continued with the bulletin. All I could think of was the fact that John Ross, like me, had some link with the Ripper, though admittedly the newscaster had only said that he was distantly related to one of the suspects, and hadn't been able to reveal which one. Somewhere, along the course of history's time line, both John Ross and I had been touched by the curse of the Ripper, and he had perhaps taken the only way out he knew in order to escape that curse, to prevent himself descending further into the insane madness that had suddenly and overwhelmingly taken hold of him. The coincidence of his having been brought to me as a patient was further proof, at least to my own way of thinking, that the Ripper had reached out across the years to take a hold on the lives of his distant, if only loosely related descendants. Perhaps, like my great-grandfather I had been given a chance to help John Ross, to save him from the awful illness that had taken hold of him and led him to commit such brutal murder. If that was the case, I appeared to have failed like my great-grandfather. The only help I'd given him had been to prescribe drugs to control what I thought was a mild paranoia, and eventually to advise him to co-operate with the police, when perhaps he might have benefited from a more sympathetic approach.

  Reality seemed a million miles away as I made my way, with leaden feet, back to the study, chiding myself all the way to my chair. I had entered a world that was so far removed from the safe sane one I usually inhabited that I wondered if I'd blundered into a nightmare of my own making, allowing myself to have become so affected by the words of the Ripper as contained in the musty yellow pages. But no, it was more than that, I was sure, there was definitely something out of the ordinary taking place, and though I wasn't sure what it was or where it was leading me, I was now more determined than ever to see the whole thing through to the end. John Trevor Ross may himself have had some tenuous relationship to me but I was sure as hell not going to give up now! I made myself a mental promise to contact his mother in the next couple of days, make sure she was okay, though of course she couldn't possibly be. She'd just lost her son. Bad enough that he'd been diagnosed as suffering from a mental illness, but he'd gone on to commit two murders, he'd taken the lives of two innocent women, and probably destroyed the futures of their husbands and families. It was as if, even after all this time, the evil that was Jack the Ripper was still at work, and along with the two most recent victims, John Trevor Ross himself had fallen victim to the hands of the killer and become yet another gruesome addition to the list of those whose lives had been torn apart by the Whitechapel Murderer.

  With a weary sigh, I switched on and re-booted the computer, in case I needed to refer to the Casebook website again, and reclined into the comfort of the leather chair. I had a feeling it was going to be a long night, and that it would be some time before I managed to lay my head down to sleep.

  As I lifted the journal from my desk, I was once again subjected to the strange feeling that came from handling its strangely warm and sticky pages. I still couldn't get away from the thought that somehow it was infused or imprinted with the essence of the Ripper's evil. Despite, or perhaps because of that feeling, I was impatient to read whatever came next in his horrendous memoir, and to see if my great-grandfather would cast any further light on whatever other terrible secret he seemed to have previously hinted at.

  14th November 1888

  I have languished these last days in a terrible state. Why hasn't Cavendish come? He must have received my letter, he must know by now that I have told him the truth. My head is in such ferment, such pain. I have done all that the voices have asked of me, and now they have deserted me, I am alone. They have not spoken one word to me since I put that whore Kelly to sleep. Have I displeased them? They do not even whisper in my head any longer. Shall I spill more blood, was it not enough that I sliced and butted the whore until I could scarce stand up, so weary did the work make me? And so deep did it run upon the floor that her blood fair made me slip upon it as I tried to stand still to complete the task. Two days I say, two days it took to finally wash the whore's blood from my self, and even though I removed and covered up my clothes still there was so much of the stuff that her blood stained even my shirt and my socks, so much that I have burned them.

  I called out in the night, but they will not come, my voices are so silent. Where are they, why have they left me alone? Where is Cavendish? He must come; he is the only one who knows. He will tell me what to do.

  20th November 1888

  I am losing track of time and days. I can no longer work, and they will surely not let me back now. I have heard nothing from Cavendish, yet the whole of London is ablaze with news of the Ripper, of me, of what I have done to rid the city of the whores. Every newspaper, on every street corner screams out of my prowess, and the police still blunder forth in fruitless search for Jack, and I am here all the time, but where is Cavendish?

  I found something almost pitiful about the latest entries in the journal of Jack the Ripper. He had becom
e almost childlike in his cries for help. His voices were gone, as if in perpetrating the final and most hideous murder of his career to date his own mind had switched off that part of itself, perhaps in a sort of self-defence mechanism, as though Jack the Ripper had become appalled and revolted at the scale of his crime. He was crying in the night, crying for help that would not come, and he was certainly desperate for my great-grandfather to attend upon him, after all, over a week had now passed since the terrible night of Mary Kelly's death, and he would have expected some response from my great-grandfather by that time, assuming of course that he'd received the Ripper's letter.

  I was intrigued by his mention of losing his job. This at least confirmed that up until some point he was engaged in gainful employment. I thought, having formed my own opinion of his identity that I knew exactly where he worked and in what capacity, and in some ways this admission in the journal further confirmed my thoughts of his identity. This fitted well with the facts I had ascertained from my notes.

  There were now so few pages left in the journal, I was confident that I would be able to complete my reading of it by my own self-imposed deadline. I just wished, like the Ripper, that I could understand why my great-grandfather hadn't responded to the letter, to his advance warning of the murder of Mary Kelly. The answer to that question was soon to be revealed to me, and was almost as intriguing as anything I had read over the previous three days!