“They called me mad way before they called me a murderer.”
—— Robert Hale
In 1889, the winter of the first year after no news of the Whitechapel Demon, misty smell and disquieting fog covered London again. Classified as a conventional dissociative personality, a.k.a mad, Robert was the ridiculed, the avoided, as well as the deserted one in Clerkenwell prison. Similar to him, every perpetrator within the same corridor as him was waiting for their own day yet to come, but nobody felt more anxious and desperate than him. During this year in prison — not too long but long enough to alter one’s appearance forever, he could only see hostile but fearful faces, listen to silver keys screwing the hole and grating on his ear, and feel, and touch as he could, fogs pervaded into the cozy cell through rusty bars behind him. Everyone in the prison avoided Robert, but no discrimination or bullying happened since he went here: because he was a real police before, not a cop or an officer, and that’s why each criminal held a complicated attitude, no exception. Everyone called him “mad”, a good name for the contrast of an evil justice maintainer. Robert hadn’t felt irritated ever since, because he thought he deserved it, but his inner voice didn’t consider him as a “mad”. He wanted to prove that he wasn’t mad, but the more he saw, the more he regretted. However, he deemed that he deserved the insult, at least, because he committed regretful crimes from his perspective.
Whenever Robert — his grayish beard had grown uneven while his once-neat hair rested untidily on a wrinkled forehead, as though every thought judged his spirit internally — had free time he would take some notes on his tatty testament. Pale daylight revealed a face of “mad” that had forgotten how to hope. The testament written using dirtily worn pen, given by a gone warder, didn’t have any swear words or complaints: the only thing was a genuine story, real in his opinions, built by his whole life's belief. Thus, with nothing else to do, he always wrote, as a man of knowledge.
***
“This is Robert Hale, and I’m not mad. My only words worth to speak as myself are my story because things else are not what I’m qualified to say. These are the betrayal of justice and not the truth. What I say is truth, my blood and my regret, and I couldn’t tolerate if I’m not deserving a death. They call me ‘Mad’, then I could only accept the identity. Everything began when we took on that murder case, just six months after the rumor of Jack dissipated slowly, but as I expected, rumors are in darkness while the real, harmful evilness always exists under our feet, the brightest place. A businessman named Edmund was dead, killed by someone, and till that point our job was the easiest, which was finding an obvious criminal.
‘Edmund was just a stranger, but those strangers would usually evoke me a sense of familiarity as I have never been close enough to my surroundings before.’ I said with Elizabeth at breakfast.
‘No my sweetheart, you are doing well. As long as kids are having fun with you, that’s good enough for me.’ Mrs. Hale kissed me on the left forehead, following me with her eyes till the end of the road, I guessed.
Luckily, we had made great progress just on that day. Daniel’s name came out from the files in our office soon, and we, Arthur Collins, Frederick, George and I, had a feast together in February 5th, 1888, exactly one month before the death of my lover. At that night, she was watching the news of the Whitechapel Murderer, but she had a bad habit of believing everything without further doubts.
‘Robert, is everything going well...’ her voice was pretending to be calm.
I was hanging my suit, but I immediately came close to the table and hugged her, ‘Kids and you will all be fine. That demon is a mad that we should punish, but always stay at home just in case,’ with a deep kiss. I knew that she just wanted my confirmation. She believed me.
‘Have your dinner then. Don’t throw it away like yesterday.’
In fact, I wasn’t as confident as I thought. Compared with her, I always question, but we never had quarrels: we were happy with Thomas and Mary, with Arthur, with neighbors. I was old, unintelligent in most cases, but she, treating me as a man instead of a policeman precisely, knew every of my disadvantages,: my curiosity, sense of justice, a bit of humor, emotional, and most importantly mad.
***
Daniel Price was soon arrested as a suspect: every witness was saying about him, a pronoun simply, but nothing about his appearance: ‘because of the big fog’, everyone says like that, and we were familiar with those attitudes. Arthur, Fred and I had been to the scene at once. Fred guessed too much, so there was nobody else than Arthur and I was willing to take this boy when he arrived at our bureau. I liked him, but I had another friendly feeling to Arthur: calm, kind as always, and younger than me, not too much. When we arrived at the scene, I immediately bet that nobody had seen a scene as awful as what we’d been. We saw Daniel for the first time, wretched, skinny, so likely all of us had determined from the beginning that he wasn’t the one. We hesitated about taking the case, but if anyone was reading this he or she then could see our pitiful compassion. We found almost nothing there: one wet glove and a broken part of a silver key. We told men to clean up the scene, and after that we arrested Daniel.
Daniel was a mad man, but not as mad as I was later. We’d rather trust that his small bruises were beaten by Edmund, but not believe his assertion. Fred was told to make the interrogation, which was his first time for him. For such a young colleague I planned to go with him together but Arthur held me back. His eyes were always very genuine, very unlike to mine and those of others like Daniel. Fred, in contrast, was wise yet reckless, which was very confusing to me. If he held a firm belief then he should confirm and defend his opinion as he could, but he usually thought too much as I did. Now, realizing that I obviously didn’t have the right to criticize him because I hadn’t realized my instability till the last moment. Always huddling in a corner, Daniel seldom got up and had a normal conversation, as we observed later. However, the news came before than that was such a disaster: Fred sought an afterlife, being murdered.
Forced to see two corpses in a week, I even reacted more strongly than Arthur. He felt disgusting at the beginning, but I hadn’t noticed that before, causing me to feel a bit afraid of him. Fred died in the corridor, detention house, but before transferring Daniel to another place, we needed to take a look at him: first, assuring whether he had committed this offence; second, fulfilling my curiosity about a serial murderer. He was still huddling in the corner, but this time shivering as well.
‘I told him, Frederick, that something was wrong, wronger than we all thought.’ I chose to believe Daniel, but in a wrong way. I had to give an answer to Arthur, and I did my best.
‘I knew you were innocent, but there must have someone causing Fred’s end.’ I whispered to him and left.
I found another part of the silver key in Fred’s pocket, but this clue was left too clearly as it looked like just a trap. When I was hesitating and identifying the familiar pattern on the fragment — about one third big of a key, Arthur came back: Fred’s family decided to prosecute the suspect, choked and shocked, because he took away Fred’s life.
Therefore he was brought on the defendant’s desk, the trap that almost nobody has escaped. We raised our heads, saw icy-cold faces of the jury — they hate murderers, even much more than before — and witnessed the sentence we would never forget. ‘Death’, and then ‘Be ‘ware of your surroundings’, he shouted. Things happened randomly without any forewarning. ‘Ridiculous’, we complained, but laughed. I’ve seen this setting before, in other courts where I was the side of audience, the side of majority, but it was the first time I listened to a dying criminal, a skinny clown and a life that I have chosen or been chosen now. After the court, my colleagues went back to their own tracks of life, drinking beers, taking off coats, but Arthur and I did nothing except from throwing files in our office, about Fred and Daniel, and others, into the bottom of the bin. We waited, waited for something better to knock our doors and bring us out of grief.
***
‘You must be kidding me,’ a reasonable feeling, typical, but couldn’t be common in my life: twice, and another time when I became the protagonist. What happened? The suspect got killed, and the office became all in a muddle, extremely rare. Who is the West London Jack? Nobody knows, but the question consistently entwined every colleague except from Arthur and I. We had our intuitions from the beginning, but since I hadn’t invited Arthur to meet with me for two weeks, I was unsure about his opinions. We’re friends, closest, but the sentence by Daniel, the dead now, had planted a deep doubt in my head. The dead are friendly, even sometimes more trustable than the alives from my perspective. Files thrown in the bin were picked up again, reluctantly. Daniel’s cell was examined again, but this time by myself. If someone was intending to finish my old bones, then I would have felt more accepted than others, I thought. My mind went back to the day I saw Edmund’s flesh. They died in the same fashion, the same personality but not the same gesture. Daniel was holding something, and I opened his hands: a big silver fragment, and I had no hesitation for the first time in my life to put those fragments together. I now knew the pattern: a copy of my dwelling’s key.
I had the longest night in my life, on the day after Arthur returned to his house from my house. Over two weeks, that was his first time having the regular tea chat in our kitchen just like before. He was friendly to Mary and Thomas, but I had to prove a conclusion for my doubts, whether it's true or false. After seeing him off, I then returned to the pile of files in the office. I brought all I could see, all I could question, including those evidence. I searched, thinking about the dead, the pretention house, Arthur, the scream on the court and most importantly, myself and my family. My heart beat like Jack chopping the ground. It was March, the fifth day of the spring, but the night made me shiver as if my memory was still in the day of Christmas. My keys were chinking, and on my way back to the sweet home I felt the strongest fear forever in my life. Victims always know the murderer regardless of how well the latter was pretending, because there was a resonance in bones: both mentally ill. How painful they should be, I thought, to be killed by the ‘just’. I felt my veins swelling and hands trembling, and I saw the fog. It was everywhere, permeating every open pore on the skin, rough, smooth, colored, men, women, poor or noble, but it was soaking our purest humanity out, dissipating them to replace with numbness and ignorance, so in London, fogs became so famous, not only because of its morbid beauty and mysteriousness but also its opacity and stinky smell. There was about two blocks from my house, as it looked like an infinitely long path. I saw my wife through the foggy weather — my eyes were still fine — just stepping out from the gate. She went out home, and she was just turning her body directing to my position, but fog suddenly choked my throat, and I lost myself in a world of mist.
I woke up after at least a century, and I felt immediate pain at my feet as I walked for ten miles instead of two blocks. I saw Arthur. Bleeding. Tiring. A stranger older than me, than the figure I met three hours ago. But he was Arthur indeed. Wound. I was going to faint out again, but I found that I had blood on my fists as well. I was holding the silver gadget. Blood. My wife was dying, and that was the second time I felt being amused, a sense of speechlessness. She came out. Why, don’t you believe me. I was indignant, but too tired to take effective actions, just like I had killed someone. I later learnt that he was witnessing my ‘crime’. But not, at that moment. I stabbed to Arthur — I knew it was you. No it was not me — though I now regret everything I did. We had a quasi fight. I could feel that he didn’t want to harm me even a bit. While I felt irritable. My beating heart, swelling veins. Nobody will deserve belief anymore. Nobody will believe me anymore. My tears were evanishing in the surreal mist. Possibly freeze in a distance. I found something hard in my pocket: another identical silver key. Someone might have copied my key. ‘There could be no one else than my best friend,' I thought. I waited to give a time for hesitating, for calming down, but I couldn’t. We then had a real fight. He was staring at me pitifully, very purely.
‘I knew you are mad, and you are indeed mad,’ he breathed hard, ‘but there must have someone killing her. They need an answer.’ Spoke. ‘Robert, everyone is asking who killed them. Nobody asks why they needed someone to be guilty.’ His wretched and regretful face was familiar to me: that’s the same expression on my face now. Besides, his words were completely true.
‘Mad’ became the one on the stage of the court, while he had nothing to say to alert — nobody will listen to a ‘mad’. Everything looked like a chaotic roll of wool, but I suddenly didn’t feel as curious as I did in the past. I wanted Thomas and Mary back, as well as my dearest Elizabeth, my wife. Yet all I could remember is the silver key, the blurry details and the evil, abominable, beating heart rhythm: nothing about the court, and Daniel wouldn’t remember those trivial cheers, quarrels and ‘he deserves a death!’ I left the place, with a likely rested heart, and newspapers were all around the office, the neighborhood and the whole London. They exaggerated: ‘mad’ killed his wife, famous Fred, pathetic Edmund, harmed his best colleague and indirectly murdered the undeserved victim Daniel. If I was not realizing that I was a dissociative lunatic now, if I wasn’t aware of myself, I might really consider there is another outlaw. They were not lying, in another sense, and I was perhaps the real so-called ‘mad’ they needed to put on newspapers.”
***
Robert raised his head slowly. The wrinkles that were always tightened with tiredness had softened into resignation now. His hair, entirely grey now, implied a figure refusing to seek truth anymore. He was immersed in the atmosphere, the huge concept of London, the city surrounding himself across his life. Suddenly, the grating sound disturbed his poor ears, and the warder reluctantly pulled him out of the grisly cell. Robert didn’t assume this was an earlier death, but possibly an earlier death was good for him as well. They stopped. Robert was led to a brighter room without darkness, closer to the outside, the fogs and the ordinary lives. A man came downstairs, stomping reassuring and heavy sounds, wearing the same suit Robert has worn in his previous life and sitting his plump figure down. Robert sensed that there was something worse than death and worse than living like this.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Hale. Saving our time, let’s jump straight into it. You must miss your life in the office and elsewhere... definitely not here. Am I right?”
He received a turbid yet adamant stare.
“Sorry, Mr. Hale. I’m from the Criminal Investigation Department. I’m here to tell you that we... were partially wrong, before, in the past, especially... for your case. You are not a lunatic... or a mad. You know what I mean.”
This time he heard a breath, a slow breath that seemed inadvertent, but he heard something conveyed in this blow: madness doesn’t matter anymore. Robert should write this sentence at the end of his paper. Tears and wrath were well paid in someone deserved instead of squandered at this moment.
“The murderer wasn’t you, nor Mr. Collins. But that arrived too late and, you can imagine, didn’t matter anymore. What important is, if you want, Mr. Hale, we can help you...”
His respondent has left, using his swollen, painful feet.
“...to appeal for a postponement of death.”