Creatures of the Pool Read Free

and poisoned himself, less than a minute’s walk from the High Rip killing but seventy years earlier. Black water streams beneath the Bridewell gate and down to Dale Street as if the well has spontaneously revived and overflowed. Tithebarn Street grows more whole and more Victorian as I lead my audience towards the river, having told the Cosgrove tale, and then my father says “Don’t you take them on the Maybrick walk?”
    “That’s where we’re going, where his office was.”
    “I’m talking about where he took his constitutional every day he was at work before he went home to his poor scared wife.”
    Even if I seem less informed than my customers deserve to expect, I have to admit “I don’t know where that is.”
    “Along Dale Street and up Cheapside. He’d stop for a while outside the Cosgrove house and then he’d hang round where Richard Morgan died. Once his clerk saw Maybrick pacing up and down like he was marking territory or in a cell. Tom Lowry, the clerk’s name was. He never dared tell while Maybrick was alive, and he didn’t even when he was a witness at the widow’s trial.”
    “He always liked murders, didn’t he, Maybrick?” The loquacious woman has rediscovered her voice. “They say he bought the house he died in because there was supposed to have been one there. And that clerk was in his diary. Maybrick thought he’d found something out and it reads like he’d have killed the boy as well if it mightn’t have given him away.”
    “I can’t speak for anyone else,” the American complains, “but I’ve no idea what all this is about.”
    “Gav will fill you in,” my father says and rides ahead.
    James Maybrick was a cotton broker who often stayed in London with one of his brothers. Six months after Jack the Ripper’s last recorded crime, Maybrick died of arsenic poisoning in the riverside mansion into which he’d moved with his wife and children the previous year. Just over a century later, a Liverpool man produced a diary that was signed Jack the Ripper. Numerous references in the diary lead the reader to conclude that it was written by James Maybrick.
    I’ve barely finished relating this when the woman and her companion start to disagree about the authenticity of the item. The man who took it to a London literary agent said he’d had it from a friend who wouldn’t tell him where it came from and who’d died, you might think conveniently, the previous year. Yes, but experts have tested the paper and confirm that it’s a real Victorian journal. Fair enough, but why are nearly fifty pages missing at the front? Maybe they contained things that someone didn’t want the rest of us toread. Not so likely considering what was left in, and mightn’t the writer have needed a Victorian journal to convince the experts and just cut out pages that were already used? He made it look as if they were written by the same person, because the diary starts in the middle of an entry, but it’s pretty convenient to have Whitechapel on the first page to explain why he killed women there. The experts say the ink is the kind Maybrick might have used, and you can’t buy it any more. Maybe, but they don’t say the writer made a mistake about Michael Maybrick. It’s full of verses like the ones the Ripper sent the police, and the writer says he’s as good at poems as his brother Michael. Only Michael never wrote any. He was well known as a composer and set verses to music. For James Maybrick not to know this is as likely as that Sir Arthur Sullivan’s brother would believe Sullivan wrote the words of The Mikado when Gilbert did.
    By now we’re abreast of the offices that have occupied Exchange Station since the railway went underground along a new route. My father is still playing outrider, as if he’s looking for danger ahead, and the woman turns to me. “What do you think?”
    I think the diary reads like the work of someone trying to sound like the Ripper of the letters that have been