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the liver removed and the ears and nose, but the womb and a three-month-old foetus untouched. Why? To state the hunger which motivated the killings, presumably, but what hunger was that? If cannibalism, surely he would never have controlled himself sufficiently to preserve a portion of his food with which to taunt the police? If not, what worse reality was he disguising from the police, and perhaps from himself, as cannibalism?
    You swallow the saliva that’s pooling under your tongue and try to grasp your theories. It’s as if the hunger spat out the kidney. Not literally, of course. But it certainly seems as if the Ripper had been trying to sate his hunger by varying the delicacies, as if it were a temperamental pet. Surely the death of Mary Kelly couldn’t have satisfied it for good, though.
    Then you remember the box. If he had externalized the hunger as something other than himself, could his mind have persuaded him that the hunger was alive independent of him and might be trapped? Could he have used one of the portions of Mary Kelly as a lure? Would that have seemed a solution in the grotesque algebra of his mind? Might he have convinced himself that he had locked away his hunger in time, and having scratched the dates on the box to confirm his calculations have thrown it in the river? Perhaps the kidney had been the first attempted lure, insufficiently tempting. And then—well, he could hardly have returned to a normal life, if indeed he had left one, but he might have turned to the socially acceptable destruction of alcoholism and died unknown.
    The more you consider your theory the more impressive it becomes. Perhaps you can write it up as an article and sell it somewhere. Of course you’ll need to pursue your research first. You feel happy in a detached unreal way, and you even go to your companion willingly for the first time in, now you think about it, a long while. But you feel apart from the moist dilation of flesh and the hard dagger thrust, and are glad when it’s over. There’s something at the back of your mind you need to coax forward. When you’ve dealt with that you’ll be able to concentrate on other things.
    You walk towards her. The light is flickering and the walls wobble like a fairground corridor. As you approach her, her dress peels apart and her body splits open. From within the gap trails a web towards which you’re drawn. At the centre of the web hangs a piece of raw meat.
    Your cry wakes you but not your companion. Her body feels like burning rubber against you, and you flinch away. After a minute you get out of bed. You can’t stand the sensation, and you want to shake off the dream. You stare from the window; the darkness is paling, and a bird sings tentatively. Suddenly you gasp. You’ll write that article now, because you’ve realised what you need. You can’t hope to describe the Ripper or even to meet a psychopath for background. But there’s one piece of first-hand research you can do that will help you to understand the Ripper. You don’t know why you didn’t read your dream that way at once.
    Next day you begin searching. You read all the cards you can find in shop windows. They aren’t as numerous or as obvious as you expected. You don’t want to find yourself actually applying for a course of French lessons. You suppose there are magazines that would help you but you’re not sure where to find them. At last, as the streets become grimmer, you notice a group of young men reading cards in a shop window. They nudge each other and point to several of the cards, then they confer and hurry towards a phone box. You’re sure this time.
    You choose one called Marie, because that was what Mary Kelly used to call herself. No particular reason, but the parallel seems promising. When you telephone her she sounds dubious. She asks what you want and you say “Nothing special. Just the usual.” Your voice may be disturbing her, because your tongue is sticking somehow, to the