Patricia Cornwell – Portrait Of A Killer Jack The Ripper

When Mizen and the two men reached the stable yard on Buck’s Row, Constable John Neil had come across the body and was alerting other police in the area by calling out and flashing his bull’s-eye lantern. The woman’s throat had been severely cut, and Dr. Rees Ralph Llewellyn, who lived nearby at 152 Whitechapel Road, was immediately roused from bed and summoned to the scene. Mary Ann Nichols’s identity was unknown at this time, and according to Dr. Llewellyn, she was “quite dead.” Her wrists were cold, her body and lower extremities were still very warm. He was certain she had been dead less than half an hour and that her injuries were “not self-inflicted.” He also observed that there was little blood around her neck or on the ground.

He ordered the body moved to the nearby Whitechapel Workhouse mortuary, a private “dead house” for workhouse inmates and not in­tended for any sort of proper forensic postmortem examination. Llewellyn said he would be there shortly to take a better look, and Constable Mizen sent a man to fetch an ambulance from the Bethnal Green police station. Victorian London hospitals did not have ambulances and there was no such thing as rescue squads.

The usual means of rushing a desperately sick or injured person to the nearest hospital was for friends or Good Samaritan passersby to carry the patient by the arms and legs. Sometimes the cry “Send for a shutter!” rang out, and the afflicted one would be conveyed on a window shutter carried like a stretcher. Ambulances were used by police, and most po­lice stations had one of these unwieldy wooden-sided handcarts with its lashed-in sturdy black leather bottom that was equipped with thick leather straps. A tan leather convertible top could be unfolded, but prob­ably did little more than offer partial protection from prying eyes or bad weather.

In most cases, an ambulance was used to remove a drunk from a public place, but occasionally the cargo was the dead. It must have been quite a chore for a constable to navigate a handcart at night along unlighted, narrow, rutted streets. Such an ambulance is extremely heavy, even with­out a patient, and is very difficult to turn. Based on the one I found in Metropolitan Police storage, I would guess that the cart weighs several hundred pounds and would have been extremely difficult to pull up the most gentle hill, unless the constable at the handles was strong and had a good grip.

This morbid means of transportation was one that Walter Sickert would have seen had he lingered in the dark and watched his victims being carted away. It must have been thrilling to spy on a constable huff­ing and straining as Mary Ann Nichols’s almost severed head lolled from side to side while the big wheels bounced and her dripping blood speck­led the street.

Sickert is known to have drawn, etched, and painted only what he saw. Without exception, this is true. He painted a handcart that is almost identical to the one I saw in police storage. His picture is unsigned, un­dated, and titled The Hand Cart, Rue Stjean, Dieppe. Some catalogues refer to it as The Basket Shop, and in the painting the view is from the rear of a handcart that has what looks very much like a folded-down tan convertible top. Stacked in front of a shop across the narrow, deserted street are what appear to be large, long baskets, similar to what the French used as stretchers for the dead. A barely visible figure, possibly a man wearing some sort of hat, is walking along a sidewalk, looking over to see what is inside the cart. At his feet is an inexplicable black square shape that might be a piece of luggage, but could be part of the sidewalk, rather much like an open iron sewer trap. In Mary Ann Nichols’s mur­der case, the newspapers reported that the police did not believe the “trap” in the street had been opened, implying that the killer had not es­caped through the labyrinth of vaulted brick sewers that ran beneath the Great Metropolis.

A trap is also an opening in stage floors that gives actors quick and easy access to a scene in progress, usually to the surprise and delight of the unsuspecting audience. In most productions of Shakespeare’s Ham­let, the ghost enters and exits through the trap. Sickert probably knew far more about stage traps than sewer traps. In 1881, he played the ghost in Henry Irving’s Hamlet at the Lyceum Theater. The dark shape at the figure’s feet in Sickert’s painting could be a theater trap. It could be a sewer trap. Or it could be a detail Sickert created to tease viewers.