[speaking to Best and Chief Inspector Abberline] She was never Ripper, that girl. But you two... [to Best] You for profit... [to Abberline] You for guilt, I suspect, wanted it so. Now I ask us to undertake this. That we find a little joy in his continued absence, that we cease to look for him in every act of evil that crosses our path. There is an abundance of that hereabout and I would have obsession blinker us to the wider world no longer. Am I understood?
Edmund, this last year, that lunatic will ever bind me to you but you ask too much. He lives still, he breathes this air still. These streets demand your vigilance.
Edmund Reid
No. We did everything in our power, used every instrument allowed to us, some that were not. All that we can hope for now is that he is gone and stays gone. He will own my life no more.
Reid, I cannot help but think the man's further excesses, his need to move beyond that initial batch... Dozens have perished, your wife almost among them... Had I not bowed to pressure to keep those bodies secret, the public knowledge of those deaths might have been enough to sate his madness.
Edmund Reid
Word of advice, Ressler. This work we perform, it does not serve to look backward. This city, wickedness will ever leave its spores here. You and I, we are not magicians. We cannot see through walls or into men's minds. Dozens perished, but hundreds who were ill are now well once more. We fight. We fight with all the skills we may muster. Beyond that, we may do no more.
Fred Best tells you, he needs something shown in return.
Edmund Reid
You do as I ask, and I shall give you a story that, though you connive and bribe your way to the Devil himself, it will not be bettered.
FBFred Best
[smiles] Go on.
Edmund Reid
"How Stanley Bone, secret slumlord, is exposed by the actions of a whore-runner." Corruption and sex, Mr. Best. Surely it does not come more honeyed than that!
Wait, Inspector. You must know that Sergeant Drake was forced, at gunpoint and against his will, to become an accessory to these crimes. He is for his own part as fine a policeman as he was a soldier, and innocent of all wrongdoing. And Inspector, when you return to your home this eve, give thanks to your god you will never set eyes upon the things I have witnessed. The bravest of men butchered like pigs. Sons and brothers in their hundreds left for carrion. Dirt beetles crawling at feast in their torn hollows... and all for queen and country. [tugs off his scarab necklace and looks at it] The Egyptians were fools. How can any god presume to know the weight of one man's heart?
[Faulkner draws his derringer from behind his back...]
Joshua was right. Justice has become a commodity. Is this the shadow of what is to be, Inspector? My brother used to say the future belongs to men of reason, not of faith.
Disorder, Inspector. Everything from the smallest system to our entire world moves always, irretrievably, from order into chaos. And there is nothing to be done about it. Do you share that belief?
Oh, I am rational, inspector. And I hear every day men such as yourself, who would have us believe our journey to truth will set us free. But man has no more desire for truth than a dung beetle. Like any animal, he desires meat and sex. And like any animal who feels himself caged by what he is, he will yearn for anything that lies beyond the bars. Dee called it magic. You call it progress.
Say, imagine, we might, you and I, walk into a chophouse on the Commercial Road, and, in that chophouse, we lay our hands upon the shoulder of the man the world made, the Ripper, know him unequivocally for that killer. What would we do?
FAFred Abberline
There is what I would like to do, and there is what I am permitted to do.
Edmund Reid
And so instead of pinioning his head to the wall through his eyeball, we, we would show him our irons, then go about the process of proof.
FAFred Abberline
We would. I would!
Edmund Reid
Evil men do as they please. Men who would be good, they must do as they are allowed.
Ripper Street · 36 quotes
Edmund Reid
