Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed Read Online Free Page B

known all this and been the detective back then?” I asked him.
    “I would immediately put Sickert under surveillance to try to find where his bolt holes [secret rooms] were, and if we found any, we would get search warrants,” he replied as we drank coffee in an East End Indian restaurant.
    “If we didn’t get any more evidence than what we’ve now got,” he went on, “we’d be happy to put the case before the crown prosecutor.”

CHAPTER THREE
    THE UNFORTUNATES
    I t is hard to imagine that Walter Sickert did not engage in London’s festive activities on the much-anticipated bank holiday of August 6th. For the art lover on a budget, a penny would buy admission into all sorts of exhibits in the squalid East End; for the better off, a shilling would pay for a peek at the masterpieces of Corot, Diaz, and Rousseau in the high-priced galleries on New Bond Street.
    Tramcars were free—at least those running to Whitechapel, the city’s crowded clothing district where costermongers, merchants, and money changers loudly hawked their goods and services seven days a week while ragged children prowled the fetid streets for food and a chance to trick a stranger out of a coin. Whitechapel was home to “the people of the dustbin,” as many good Victorians called the desperate wretches who lived there. For a few farthings, a visitor could watch street acrobatics, performing dogs, and freak shows, or get drunk. Or he could solicit sex from a prostitute—or “unfortunate”—of whom there were thousands.
    One of them was Martha Tabran. She was about forty and separated from a furniture warehouse packer named Henry Samuel Tabran, who had walked out of her life because of her heavy drinking. He was decent enough to give her a weekly allowance of twelve shillings until he heard she was living with another man, a carpenter named Henry Turner. But Turner eventually lost patience with Martha’s drinking habits and had left her two or three weeks ago. The last time he saw her alive was two nights earlier, on Saturday, August 4th—the same night Sickert was making sketches at Gatti’s music hall near the Strand. Turner handed Martha a few coins, which she wasted on drink.
    For centuries, many people believed women turned to prostitution because they suffered from a genetic defect that caused them to enjoy sex for the sake of sex. There were several types of immoral or wanton women, some worse than others. Although concubines, mistresses, and good wenches were not to be praised, the greatest sinner was the whore. A whore was a whore by choice and was not about to retire from her “wicked and abominable course of life,” Thomas Heywoode lamented in his 1624 history of women. “I am altogether discouraged when I remember the position of one of the most notorious in the trade, who said, ‘For once a whore and ever a whore, I know it by my self.’ ”
    Sexual activity was to be confined to the institution of marriage and had been ordained by God for the sole purpose of the continuation of the species. The solar center of a woman’s universe was her uterus, and monthly menstrual cycles precipitated great storms of disorders—throbbing lust, hysteria, and insanity. Women were a lower order and incapable of rational, abstract thinking, a view with which Walter Sickert concurred. He was quite eager to assert that women were incapable of understanding art, that they were interested in it only when it “ministers to their vanity” or elevates them “in those social classifications they study so anxiously.” Women of genius, the rare few there were, Sickert said, “count as men.”
    His beliefs were not unusual for the era. Women were a different “race.” Contraception was a blasphemy against God and society, and poverty flourished as women gave birth at an alarming rate. Sex was to be enjoyed by women for the sole reason that physiologically, an orgasm was thought to be essential for the secretion of the fluids necessary for