They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper by Bruce Robinson

Author:Bruce Robinson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-10-05T23:00:00+00:00

The dog’s name was ‘Smoker’. It belonged to a journalist called Jasper Waring, and within two minutes they were to expose the ‘meticulous search’ of the new police buildings as a charade.42

‘The police have had another discovery forced upon them,’ mocked the Evening News. ‘A gentleman who had great faith in the scenting powers of his Spitzbergen Terrier offered its services to the police at Westminster, but the offer was declined without thanks.’ Ignoring the ‘tailor’s dummies’, Waring obtained consent from the works contractor at New Scotland Yard, a Mr Grover. ‘The dog was placed in the dark vaulted recesses where the body was found,’ continued the News, ‘and the animal at once made it apparent that it had the scent of something underground. The earth was removed, and at a little more than half a foot depth, the dog seized something, which turned out to be a human leg. The police eventually made themselves useful, by wrapping the leg carefully in brown paper and taking it to the mortuary.’ The News added as an acid codicil: ‘Anybody is at liberty to make his own comment.’43

I don’t know what these comments might have been, but I suspect they may have been influenced by the now universal public disgust felt for Warren’s police force. If its entranced Commissioner hoped to draw attention away from New Scotland Yard by hauling his silly arse around Hyde Park, he had most singularly failed. I imagine the public were asking why he didn’t take his bloodhounds into the foundations of his own building – Warren didn’t visit the vaults until 19 October – and further, why the Metropolitan Police had consistently deceived the public it purported to serve.44

‘The police would make a thorough search [and] this would occupy some considerable time’ (the Echo, 3 October). ‘The grounds where the remains were found were yesterday subject to rigid examination’ (The Times, 4 October). ‘The police are searching in all directions for the missing portions of the body’ (Lloyd’s, 7 October) – but not, apparently, even six inches into the dirt underneath the spot where the torso was found.

‘Smoker’ had tossed a potentially disastrous spanner in the works. Dr Bond was on his way, and when he got there he pronounced the leg to be human, and estimated that it ‘had been buried at least six weeks’.

Oh dear. Did this ever put the police in Shit Street. Detective Dog had changed everything. Reality was swept aside, and suddenly the authorities were obliged to insist that the torso had been there all the time, because if the workmen were right, and the body hadn’t been there when the leg was buried, it meant that Jack had visited the vaults at New Scotland Yard twice.

‘The statement of the workmen,’ wrote The Times, ‘that the body found a fortnight ago had only been in place from the Saturday until the Tuesday, is a matter of the greatest difficulty to those who have investigation of the mystery.’45 We might reasonably consider this an understatement.

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