A Flash of Silver (Courtesy of Belfast Ghost Tours)

Jack the Ripper, as most of you know, is one of the world’s most famous murderers. In the Victorian era, which idolised criminals as often as it made examples of them, the Ripper tales were both daringly, horribly romantic, and just plain scary. The good citizens of Whitechapel feared to step out of their house after dark, because who could know if next time the Ripper would take a woman from good standing and slit her throat, alongside the women of the night?

I’ve heard many theories about who Jack really was. I have read books that claim to be written by him, or by someone who knew him, and I have read many of the letters supposedly sent by Jack to the newspapers. It’s been surmised he was American, as many of his so-called letters saluted the addressee with the word “Boss,” then American slang. Because of the cut of his victims, it’s been widely accepted that he was a doctor, and a smart man, as he was never caught (although his spelling left a lot to be desired).

One theory I had never heard of before, and one that was told to me on a ghost tour this week, was that Jack was a sailor.

Earlier I brought up the Prince Albert Tower, which stands by the River Lagan and tilts to the side, just a wee bit, because of the natural shifting of the ground beneath Belfast. The name Belfast is actually a British bastardization of the Celtic words for mouth of the sandy ford, so this city rests on top of a river, and the parts that are not built over the water is built over bog and marsh. Boglands are notoriously unstable, and so over time the clocktower has shifted ever so slightly. Local legend has it that it tilts from the weight of so many prostitutes. And so we go to the year of the Ripper murders, before the Prince Albert tower had earned its tilt, and prostitutes lingered the city streets after nightfall.

It is night, and drizzling. The wind carries a sharp bite, and even when it stops nipping at your ears and neck the air carries a damp chill. Winter has come early to Belfast. While it is the weekend, and all of the ships are moored safely in the dock, their sailors filling up the local pubs, there are not many people walking the city streets. It is too cold a night for that.

Walking up and down the streets, smiling suggestively at every man that passes her by, is a young lady of the night. Her face is lined prematurely from the stress of the slums, from the weight of lovers whose names she never knew. Most of the men who pass her by refuse to look at her, staring studiously at their polished shoes. These are the ones she taunts and calls after, knowing that anything is better than being invisible. Even their hatred does not burrow so deeply into her heart as their sideways glances. Other men wink at her, but they’ve got girlfriends at home, or they’re poor as church mice. One young man sidles up to her, not a tuppence in his coat pocket, and tries to suggest that they spend an evening together. She sends him away, and he shouts angrily after her, calling her a wench and a jade. She ignores him, tucking her coat more closely around her.

It’s not like she wants to do this. She needs the money. It’s not easy, living in the Belfast slums, with cholera spreading like wildfire, with the rain and damp seeping into everything like a stain, from the walls of her little apartment to her clothes. For every man she beds, it’s closer to the day that her little sister doesn’t have to work in the linen mills, knee-deep in the putrid water that surrounds the machines, slipping her white little fingers into the clogs and gears of the mill whenever the contraptions get jammed. Just last week one of the other prostitute’s sons got his fingers caught and was sucked into the machine, where he was crushed to death. How old had he been? Seven? Eight?

“Are you all right, miss?” a man’s voice says. A customer.

Every man should be treated like a potential client, the woman who ran the brothel always told her. So she puts a flirtatious smile on her face and whips around to face him. “Oh, I’m fine,” she purrs.

“That man looked like he was bothering you.”

He wasn’t a bad-looking lad, she could tell that right away, even with the poor lighting. His teeth looked relatively good. That was important. It was terrible kissing old men, their teeth brown and black, or, worse, gone. And his accent—British, maybe; she thought there might have been a hint of Welch hidden in there somewhere. It didn’t matter. He wore the uniform of a British sailor, which meant he had some pocket money, at least, if he hadn’t spent it all on drink. “Between you and me, I don’t mind being bothered,” she says, “so long as it’s you doing the bothering. You’re not from around here, are you, stranger? D’you want me to help make your stay…memorable?”

His grin widens, and her heart skips a beat—not out of love, or lust, which she stopped feeling years ago, but fear. It’s his face—for a moment, it looks wolfish, dark, alien. But in a moment it is gone, and he is charming as he takes her arm in his and leads her down a nearby alley.       

It is not the alley that she would have chosen, had she had a say in the matter. (She rarely did. Men preferred to pick the spots of their trysts, where they thought no one they recognised would see them.) There were queer stories about that place, about screams and phantom fingers that reached out to touch you. But she followed, falling into routine. How many times had she done this, now? There was no telling, no counting. This was her lot in life. All that mattered was his silver.

And so it goes according to routine, all until she sees a flash of silver—and there’s a knife to her throat.

She screams. Her mum always said she had a cry to rouse the dead, even as a wee baby, and she screams now as she has never screamed before. He wrestles her to the ground, and she feels the silver give a little slip into her skin. A trickle of warm blood drips down her neck. He has pressed the back of her head against the brick of the alleyway, and he is pressing down hard on her chest and her windpipe. Oh, God, she thinks; this is the end. And I haven’t even repented yet. Still she screams, and she digs her nails into the flesh of his face, which again has turned wolfish and evil and dark.

She wishes, somewhere in the back of her soul, that she had let the young lad without a

penny take her.  

The knife is digging deep, and there are black dots in front of her eyes. She can’t see the man’s face anymore, and imagination takes over; she sees red devil’s eyes and horns sticking out of his hair. There’s a strange drumming in her head, and then his mouth is pressed against her ear, whispering something with warm, sticky breath.

And then the pressure is gone.

Have I died? She wonders faintly, but no. There’s a policeman sitting in front of her, shouting. She can barely hear him. Two others are wrestling her assailant to the ground, patting him down. They have the knife wet with her blood in their hands, and they find another one tucked by his heart, and then haul him away.

Later, they tell her that they think he is Jack the Ripper. They have sent him on to Whitechapel, but they can’t prove anything—he is only guilty of trying to kill a prostitute. “Did he say anything to you?” they ask. They beg her to explain how they met, what happened. She refuses to tell.

“He simply flashed a coin, and we went down the alley. Then he pulled the knife,” she says, although she knows she’s not been paid. It doesn’t trouble her. It’s worth her fee to escape with her life.

“But surely,” they say, frustrated now, “He must have said something to you?”  

She remembers his breath on her neck, and her body crawls with revulsion. He said something to her, that night, a devil’s curse.

“No,” is all she says. “He said nothing to me. Nothing at all.”

A month passes. The policemen make a point of telling her that her assailant is free and walking the streets of England. This terrifies her, although she keeps her face blank. After all, there is a sea between England and Belfast. And she’s going to America on the next boat. An ocean is an awfully hard distance to cross.

From the new world, she hears that Jack the Ripper has killed another prostitute. She merely hurries past the newsboys crying the news with glee, and if anyone asks why she’s distressed, she merely claims that she’s homesick.