Dorset Street was so irredeemable that in the 1920s, the buildings were all demolished to make room for the new fruit market being opened in Spitalfields. On the exact spot where room thirteen once stood, there was now a warehouse where trucks could deliver goods for the market. And at two A.M. on this November 9, over five thousand people had gathered there. They filled the narrow passage between the warehouse and the multistory car park and spilled out onto the streets around. Most of those people had come for an all-night vigil to honor all the Ripper’s victims, both from 1888 and the present.

But there were other people there as well. There were dozens of news reporters babbling on to rolling cameras in dozens of different languages. There were dozens of police officers, uniformed and plainclothed, wandering the crowd. There were souvenir carts selling WELCOME BACK, JACK and I SURVIVED NOVEMBER 9TH AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS BLOODY T-SHIRT (complete with fake bloodstain) shirts. There were food and drink vendors selling hot chestnuts, sodas, tea, sausage rolls, and ice cream. In many ways, it looked like a carnival.

No one noticed who started passing out the flyers. They just started circulating through the crowd and were passed on automatically. They contained six words only—no call to action, no instructions. Just a strange, simple message.

Several minutes later, to bring the point home, a flood of flyers drifted from the sky. The drizzle dampened them and made them heavy and sticky, so some adhered to the walls as they came down. The crowd looked up at the multistory car park behind them. The flyers were still falling, but there was no one throwing them. They came and they came, handfuls at a time.

One of the vigil organizers peeled a flyer off the wall and read it.

“What is this?” she asked. “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

Because the car park was sitting more or less on the site of the fifth Ripper murder, it had been closed and locked down for the night. Several police officers patrolled the ground floor. No one could have gotten to the top. And yet that was where the flyers were coming from. There was a lot of talking into shoulder radios, and a team ran up to scout every level and find whoever was up there. Two more police officers were in the car park office, looking at the CCTV camera screens in confusion. They could see the flyers going out, but couldn’t see the person tossing them. The reports were coming in: “Level one, clear.” “Level two, clear.”

Down in the street, the reporters stared up at the shower of paper. The cameras turned upward to get the shot. At least it was different, something to break up the monotony of waiting for this thing to happen, the endless newscaster drivel and footage of police cars cruising along.