Mary Kelly, thought Bell. The murder that the inspector had insisted was Jack the Ripper’s last. “Night or day?” he asked.
“Dead of the night. Past four in the morning.”
“What were you doing out?”
“Looking for a place to lay my head. I was knackered. Hadn’t a penny. I was peddling a magical hair-growth elixir, but no one was buying.” He flourished his razor again. “Suddenly I thought, to hell with the baldies, what did they ever do for me? Somehow find a way into haircutting instead of hair growing. That night, at four in the morning, I fell upon an honest trade, haircutting instead of hair growing. Took me two years of saving pennies to buy my razors.”
“At four in the morning, was there light to see?”
“Whitechapel was blacker than a mine in those days.”
“Then how did you see him?”
“When there is no light, your eyes see more.”
“But not a man’s face.”
“A man’s frame,” said Davy Collins. “The shape he cuts. How he moves.”
“A silhouette?” Bell asked dubiously.
“When he ran from the rents where Mary had her room.”
“But only a silhouette,” said Bell. He was getting nowhere, wasting his time. Roberts, for some reason, had played him for laughs.
“Until he ran through the light.”
“What light? You said there was no light.”
“At the end of the street was a lamppost with a light.”
“Electric?”
“In Whitechapel? Gas. Flickers.”
“Dim.”
“Like a candle in the wind—but bright, compared to the dark.”
“How far away was the lamppost?”
“Fifty feet? Maybe less.”
“What shape did the man cut?” asked Bell.
“Bounding like a hare.”
“What do you mean by a ‘hare’?”
“He ran like a boy. Fearless. Sure on his feet.”
“But he couldn’t have been a boy. How old? would you guess.”
“I don’t have to guess. I saw with these eyes. He was barely into manhood.”
Which today, Bell thought, if true, would make London’s Jack the Ripper his Jack the Ripper—a killer no older than his early forties.
“Did he appear to be a strong man?”