Strategy 2030

This is how it goes – but first, set the scene: 1888, November, Whitechapel. Dark, hours since. Fog, and chimneys pushing up smoke into it. Dirt worked into damp cobbles, sharp stink from dung, last carts long rattled away, horses gone to such stabling as there might be.

          On the corner of Commercial Street, the Ten Bells is ripe with gin and beer. Inside, a bit of singing, and clay pipes lit, and mutton with bread if you can afford it, though many hereabouts can’t. Outside, the gas lamp is lit; the light from its flame is but a small yellow pool, small enough to make the darkness thicker round about. On the wall of the pub, a poster: Ghastly Murder, it says, in the East-End, with Dreadful Mutilation of a Woman. Jack the Ripper, much feared for his awful knowledge of how to slit the throat of a young pretty woman, how to slice the neck to the bone to make it so she shan’t scream, then take out the innards, arrange them all about the body - and all without being seen.

          Tonight’s young, pretty woman steps from the lit pub into the murk of the street and places herself underneath the lamp on the corner. Let’s give her a name, bring her in properly as Mary Jane. See how fine-looking the gaslight makes her: no bonnet but fair-haired, blue-eyed, regular angel. Apron nice and white, her woollen gown, linens under, still clean enough though her boots will soon be clagged by filth from the cobbles. There’ll be a man on her arm if the night goes right. A quick fuck will bring her the fourpence to pay for a room in lodgings; she’ll lift her skirts and let a gent dig under, nothing else mind, no kissing.

          From, here, outside the Ten Bells: along Commercial Street, a left turn into Dorset Street then right, through the communal passageway to Miller’s Court and the lodging house. Gas lamp here and there, and in between? Blank, blacked-brick walls, arches, alleys, all narrow. And none lit beyond the lamps. If there’s no gent for company, Mary Jane will have to step sharp and not dwell on the coalminer she married, Davy, who came to his end early in the explosion down the mine that took thirty others, that brought her to London, that brought her to gin and a builder right near the Commercial Gas Works in Stepney. Not think of the small scrap she birthed, got from bread-and-buttering, call it fucking if you ain’t proper, with Joseph, a mason’s plasterer, a drunkard himself who knocked two of her teeth out, hollered at her when her pains started, shouted that she’d have to give the youngster up to the Foundling Hospital but how could she get the petition writ?

          Not think over the way the fog pinches your toes, works its way up your leg when your bed for the last few hours of dark is steps in a corner, doorway where you begin to wonder, in spite of your own spirit and the last long-gone gin if, when the morning sun gets up through the fog you’ll still be here and breathing but now, on this corner in the light of the Ten Bells, a likely gent approaches. Smart jacket, peaked cap, fair moustache. His face is kindly.

          ‘Will you?’ he says.

          Will she take the risk? Of course she will, because there’s likely a bed in it for her, and they walk from Commercial Street into Dorset Street, then through the passageway to Miller’s Court where the stranger jingles in his pocket for coins, four fat pennies which she drops into the tin on the sill. Along the passage way, where the walls lean narrow until the light is gone and she fumbles in the dark for the handle. She can hear the gent breathing behind her. Into the room get the candle lit and the gent steps inside, places his cap on the table and this is how it goes: he’s learnt that from the front brings too much spatter so he’ll let her get her boots off, then turn her away from him, she’ll think he’s coming from behind and oh, he is. Instead of lifting her skirts he’ll rake the knife from ear to ear watch the blood arc and pattern the wall as, silenced, she’ll sag and when the bubble and choke stops he’ll go to work. He can take his time: his fourpence has bought him the night if he needs it. He’ll set to arranging the organs nice and neat. One breast he’ll place beneath her head. The uterus he’ll remove, place on the bed above one shoulder. Her heart will be missing, when the constables come.

 

What of the child Mary Jane birthed? Small foundling – a girl, named Lily by the nurse that took her off – came squawling into the world early one April morning. Kitchen service by the age of ten, married late to a soldier who took himself off to France in January 1916 then was took apart by a shell in the Somme but not before Lily’s daughter, Esme, was well on the way. Little Esme, born fatherless in the autumn of that same year but grew to have her own child, a daughter, Leila, born in 1937 as the next war was already brewing but who went on to have her own babe, Jane Elizabeth. So many daughters, so many lives. Jane Elizabeth then, born when the Beatles were playing and love was free and peace was the thing to dig, man and who grew to give birth in 1987 to Sarah, who grows – until.

 

This is how it goes – but first, the scene: a February night, dark, hours since. Fog, and cold, traffic fumes in the air and tonight’s young, pretty woman, call her Sarah, let’s bring her in with her phone in her hand much good it does her, is walking home. Just a walk, it is, from Clapham Junction to Brixton Hill. Poynders Road: street lights, block of flats, low brick walls, bus stop, traffic lights, and a white car which has stopped and a man gets out and approaches. His head is shaved. He wears a beard, fair-to-ginger. Jacket, jeans, but a police belt, and a warrant card, and handcuffs - though his eyes have a smile about them.

          ‘You’ve breached the guidelines, being out like this,’ he says. She’s arrested, he says, and he handcuffs her and she gets in the car, in the back, and he’s behind the wheel and he drives. The South Circular: lights, road. She can hear him breathing as if running. More road then darkness as he drives on, on and Sarah realises: small bird in the fist, she is caught. On, eighty miles or so to a quiet spot and this is how it will go: he will rape her, then strangle her with his police belt. In the days after her murder, at the bus stop, on the lamp post, a poster: Missing, Please Help, it says. Please call, or text, though her phone is already in the river and he is buying petrol, and he will burn her. He will stuff her remains into builders bags and chuck them in a woodland pond. She will eventually be identified only from dental records.

          ‘You’d best get in the car,’ he’d said.

          Would she? Of course she would, because he was a police officer and he was safety because you never know who you might meet in the streets where the walls lean and the glow from the street lamp ends and darkness begins.