We heard nothing from Scotland Yard all the next day, but I was awoken at one-thirty on the morning of the first of October by men’s voices in our sitting room. After a moment’s tense listening, I heard Crow—his voice recognizable by its timbre—though I could not make out any words. I lay down again, debating whether or not I would be able to get back to sleep, and was just deciding probably not when there was a knock at my door.
“Who’s there?” I called, alert all over again.
“It’s I,” said Crow. “There’s been another murder. Do you want to come?”
Part of me wanted merely to go back to sleep (although that was seeming increasingly unlikely), but more of me was at once consumed by curiosity. “Give me a minute to dress,” I said, and shoved back the bedclothes.
When I came out, I found Crow talking to a young constable; he broke off to smile at me. “There you are, Doyle! Shall we?”
The night was cold and wet, and when we reached the scene of the crime, a dreary corner of the East End called Dutfield’s Yard, the dead woman was lying in the mud like a discarded doll.
Two doctors were already present, a Dr. Blackwell and his assistant, but they were not at all territorial (who would be, with such a corpse?) and were happy to let me examine the body. She was a smallish woman, dressed in layers of shabby clothing that were most likely everything she owned. There was a red rose pinned to her jacket, and for some reason that and the packet of lozenges clutched in her left hand stayed with me more vividly than anything else.
She was a long-faced woman with pale eyes. Between the dark and the rain—and the mud—it was impossible to tell the color of her hair. Her clothing was undisturbed, except that her dress was unfastened at the neck, and Dr. Blackwell’s assistant had done that. She was still warm.
The wound that killed her was a terrible gash that had severed her windpipe and all the vessels on the left side of her neck. The blood had pooled on the ground and run up the alley toward the door in the wall.
“Well?” said Crow.
“She certainly died from having her throat cut,” I said as he braced me to my feet. “But there’s no sign that her murderer tried to get at her abdomen.”
“When she was found,” Crow said, nodding toward a very pale-faced young man talking to Lestrade and another detective, “blood was still flowing from her neck. I don’t think her killer was done with her. He was scared away from her corpse like a scavenging dog.”
“Any chance somebody saw him?” I asked, looking at the crowd of gawkers being interviewed by the constables.
“No,” Crow said with a sigh. “I’m sure he was gone before Mr. Diemschutz even realized what he had found.”
“Does anyone know her?”
“No one yet.”
The divisional surgeon, Dr. Phillips, arrived, and I was drawn into colloquy with my fellow doctors. I am not sure how long it was before Crow appeared and began literally dragging me by the hand toward Berner Street.
“Crow! Wait! What—”
“There’s been another one,” he said, not stopping. “There’s been another murder.”
* * *
It wasn’t far from Berner Street to Mitre Square, where there was another pair of doctors, very white-faced in the lantern light, and another corpse, this one so dreadfully mutilated that I said, “He was angry at being interrupted.”
“He might have been,” said Crow. “It would explain why he would take the foolish risk of killing a second woman an hour and a mile away.”
“And dear God,” I said as I got a closer look. He had literally eviscerated this woman; I knelt awkwardly beside the body and saw that he had mutilated her face, drawing designs with the point of his knife. Somehow the delicacy of the cuts—barely more than scratches—was worse than the savage, careless disembowelment. Not that the disembowelment was not bad enough. He had removed her intestines from her abdominal cavity—as he had done to Annie Chapman. Just as I was remembering other details from the Chapman inquest, the knowledge hit me like a sandbag. “Oh God,” I said. “Crow!”
He was there immediately and helped me stand.
“He took part of her,” I said in the softest voice I possibly could. “I have to follow.”
“Well, of course you do,” he said. “He’s carrying it, whatever it is. Lead on.”
No one noticed us go.
I was not familiar with the City of London, and even if I had been, I doubt I could have made sense of it in the dark. Crow, however, seemed to know exactly where we were the whole time, and it probably wasn’t more than ten minutes before he said, “Doyle, stop! STOP!”
I stopped, and he said, “You’re heading straight for the Thames. Whatever he had, he threw it in the river. And while you can follow it further, I beg of you not to.”
“God,” I said. For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself, that I was going to plunge into the Thames after whatever part of her body it was that her killer had stolen. But then rationality reasserted itself, reclaiming its precarious throne, and I took a staggering step backward.
“Doyle?” Crow said anxiously.
“I’m all right,” I said, a few moments before I was sure it was true.
“Good,” said Crow. “For if you jumped in, I don’t believe I could pull you out again.”
“Nor do I. I’m not going to jump.”
“Good,” said Crow again, and I realized he was almost as rattled as I was.
We made our way back to Mitre Square, which Crow found with perfect assurance, as if it were not the dead of night in an unfamiliar part of town—but then I wondered if any part of the metropolis was truly unfamiliar to him. He took his self-appointed duties as the Angel of London very seriously, and he had had some unknown number of years—and no need to sleep—to learn its streets, its courts, its mews and rookeries and cul-de-sacs.
No one in Mitre Square had noticed our absence. I went back over by the body, where at least they had gotten a little more light and were playing a macabre sort of Easter egg hunt, looking for her belongings. Even though I knew it was foolish of me to kneel down again, I joined them. Crow swept off in the other direction, but came back only a few minutes later and said, “The constables swear there weren’t more than fifteen minutes between the time the square was empty and the time they found the body. Do you think that’s possible?”
“Hmmph,” I said. “I suppose so, if this fellow has their beats memorized—we already know he’s a fast worker. He’d have to have it timed exactly right. But given how dark this square is, I think it’s more likely that somebody just missed the body—and probably the murderer.”
“I think I won’t share that theory,” Crow said.
“It would not make you popular with the City Police,” I agreed. “And just because I don’t think it’s likely he could do all this in fifteen minutes, that doesn’t mean he didn’t.”
“No one heard anything, either,” Crow said.
“Of course they didn’t,” I said. “I would be disappointed if they had.”
The police surgeon, Dr. Brown, had made a sketch of the body’s position, and they were now ready to move it to the City mortuary. Crow was helping me to my feet when someone said, “Look alive, it’s himself!”
“Oh dear,” said Crow.
“What?” I said.
“Major Smith, the Acting Commissioner of the City Police. He and I have had encounters before, which he will not remember any more fondly than I do. Let’s just…” He pulled me back into the shadows with him, where we disappeared rather as I thought the murderer had probably done.
Major Smith bustled into the square, snapping questions without waiting for answers and bringing with him a sense of anxiety that he probably thought of as urgency, if he noticed it at all. I recognized his type immediately, having encountered it among both doctors and military officers. He would never get the best out of his men, and he would never know why.
Crow waited until the Major was fully i
nvolved in the kicked beehive he had made of Mitre Square, then murmured in my ear, “We should go back to Berner Street. See if they’ve found any witnesses.”
We began edging toward the exit from the square farthest from the body. I know for a fact at least one constable saw us, for he winked at me. But we were only in front of Kearley and Tonge’s warehouse when another constable came running in from Mitre Street and said something to Major Smith that I could not hear, but that made Crow go stiff.
“Oh God, not another one?” I said and was appalled at the pleading note in my voice.
“No, not that,” Crow said. “The Metropolitan Police have found a piece of her apron in Goulston Street and some kind of graffiti.”
“Goulston Street it is, then,” I said, and we were lucky that Major Smith was much too busy to hear Crow’s giggle.
* * *
The night had been full of nervous constables, and here was another one, standing in a perfectly ordinary-looking doorway, where there was a piece of bloodstained apron and, as Crow had said, some very odd graffiti.
I got out my notebook and copied it down carefully, It read:
The Juwes are
The men That
Will not
be Blamed
for nothing
“What does that even mean?” I said to Crow.
“Somebody doesn’t like Jews,” he said. “Will you wait for me?”
“Of course,” I said.
He went to talk to the constable, and I puzzled over the graffiti. It was very fresh, so that it was possible it was only two hours or so old, but it was hardly the only message chalked on the walls of that entryway, nor even the only anti-Semitic one. The fact that the murderer had dropped that piece of apron beneath it might merely be a coincidence.
But this was a murderer who didn’t drop things. Not after Martha Tabram, not after Polly Nichols, not after Annie Chapman, not after the poor woman in Dutfield’s Yard. Why did he drop this piece of apron now?
The obvious answer was: to write the graffiti. But there had been a lot of obvious answers in the Whitechapel murders that had turned out to be wrong. Much like that awful jeering letter, I found myself baffled by the question: if the murderer was going to chalk incoherent anti-Semitic messages on walls near his crimes, why was he only starting now? Or—a horrible thought—had the police just missed his previous efforts and he’d dropped the piece of apron to be sure they didn’t miss this one?
But if he was anti-Semitic, I countered myself, why was he murdering Gentile prostitutes? And what was this incoherent graffiti supposed to mean? That a Jew was the murderer and was escaping blame? The only reason for the murderer to write that was if he himself was not Jewish, in which case it defeated its own purpose—and that didn’t seem much like the Whitechapel murderer either.
And yet he had dropped the piece of apron. Perhaps he agreed with the graffiti? Perhaps it was simply an accident? There was, after all, rather a lot of graffiti in the East End, and if a fellow was going to stop in a doorway to clean off his knife, he might find it hard to avoid anti-Semitic sentiments.
Crow came back and said, “It’s much the same as with the body. One minute it wasn’t there, the next minute it was.”
“Now you see it, now you don’t,” I said, frowning.
“Quite.”
“Do you think the murderer wrote the graffiti?” I said and gave him a summary of my conjectures.
“The fundamental question,” said Crow, “is: why should he? To which, of course, there is no answer.”
It was at this point that constables and detectives started arriving, both Metropolitan and City, and with them an argument. The Metropolitan Police wanted to erase the graffiti, on the grounds that it was inflammatory; the City Police wanted to preserve the graffiti long enough to photograph it, on the grounds that it was evidence. The argument became more and more heated as daybreak came closer and closer, and reached its apogee with the appearance on the scene of Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who—over the agonized objections of a City detective—obliterated the graffiti.
Crow said, “He won’t make himself popular with that move.”
“He was unpopular enough already,” I said and, out of curiosity, asked, “Do you think he’s right?”
“I think he has good reason for concern,” said Crow, which was a neat evasion of either no or yes. “Let us go before Major Smith arrives.”
* * *
Lestrade, unlike Gregson, shared new discoveries with Crow willingly, almost reflexively, so that we had a reliable conduit of information beyond Crow’s infinite newspapers. The first thing we learned of was a postcard, received by the first post on Monday morning. Lestrade let us come and see it. It was indubitably the same hand as the letter, and it read:
I wasnt codding dear old Boss when I gave you the tip. youll hear about saucy Jackys work tomorrow double event this time number one squealed a bit couldnt finish straight off. had not time to get ears for police thanks for keeping last letter back until I got to work again.
Jack the Ripper
Crow was just as dismissive of the postcard as he was of the letter. “A man who follows the case as closely as this one does could easily have found out about the murders on Sunday, and besides, he’s guessing. The murderer wasn’t interrupted because the woman screamed. He was interrupted because Louis Diemschutz came home.”
“He said he’d cut their ears off,” Lestrade countered, “and part of the second woman’s ear was cut off.”
“But that’s not what he took with him,” Crow said, because by then we knew that the second woman was missing her uterus and left kidney. “Besides, I saw that cut, and it was accidental. He wasn’t trying to cut off her ear. I think it’s safe to say that if he’d tried, he would have succeeded.”
But Lestrade, and the Metropolitan Police behind him, were convinced enough by the letter and postcard that they had facsimiles made of both and placarded them outside their stations. They sent them to the newspapers as well, and the only result was the inevitable one: overnight the Whitechapel murderer became known as Jack the Ripper.
For reasons that I did not fully understand, this development infuriated Crow, never more so than when he caught himself using the killer’s new soubriquet. It made him sulky and inclined to say “I told you so” when Lestrade bemoaned the deluge of “Jack the Ripper” letters that had begun flooding Scotland Yard.
He was more sympathetic about the muddle of testimony surrounding the woman found dead in Dutfield’s Yard, beginning with her identity. On Monday, she was identified by Mrs. Mary Malcolm as that lady’s sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Watts. Mrs. Malcolm’s identification was quite certain and accompanied by a visitation, for Mrs. Malcolm said that at 1:20 on Sunday morning she had very distinctly felt three kisses on her cheek. Since she had been giving her sister weekly assistance for the past five years, it was indeed plausible that the woman’s spirit would have been compelled to express gratitude. However, Mrs. Malcolm’s timing was off, for the woman in Dutfield’s Yard had been dead well before 1:20, and for all her certainty on Monday, she had been unable to identify the corpse on Sunday.
Moreover, the police had secured a second identification: the woman was Elizabeth or Elisabeth Stride, known among the lodging houses of Flower and Dean Street as “Long Liz,” on account of the shortness of her stature. This identification, with multiple witnesses to attest to it, made Mrs. Malcolm’s story look even less credible, although the police couldn’t discount it entirely, especially when it turned out that Elisabeth Stride had had a vivid imagination of her own. She had accounted for an old injury to her mouth by claiming to be a survivor of the wreck of the Princess Alice in 1878, in which (she said) her husband and two children had drowned. Elisabeth herself had been kicked in the face. The trouble was that there was no record of anyone named Stride among either the victims or the survivors of the Princess Alice,
and while Elisabeth was missing her two top incisors, her claims that the roof of her mouth had been damaged were demonstrably untrue.
The last night of Elisabeth Stride’s life was just as confusing as everything else about her. Where with the previous murders there had been no witnesses, in Dutfield’s Yard there were too many.
And the most baffling of them was Israel Schwartz.
Schwartz presented his information to the police on the thirtieth, before there was anything in the papers, and he told a very strange story about two men and a woman, who he thought was Stride, that he had seen on Berner Street fifteen minutes before Elisabeth Stride’s body was found. Since Mr. Schwartz was Hungarian and spoke not a word of English, he could not be questioned directly, a fact which frustrated Lestrade no end, but the story he told through his interpreters, both to the police and to an enterprising reporter who tracked him down on the first of October, stayed extremely consistent, and there seemed little doubt that he was telling the truth.
What to make of that truth was an entirely different matter. Schwartz had seen a man attacking a woman, and that man had yelled, either at Schwartz or at a third man who might or might not have been with the first man, “Lipski!” Schwartz had fled, and he thought the third man had chased him, but admitted he wasn’t sure.
“‘Lipski’ seems a strange thing to yell,” I said.
“Israel Lipski,” said Crow, who had brought me the story from Scotland Yard. “Did you not see the reports of the Angel poisoning case last— No, you would’ve been busy not dying in Afghanistan. Never mind that. Israel Lipski murdered a woman named Miriam Angel by forcing her to drink nitric acid.”
“Good God,” I said.
“He confessed and was hanged, but his name has become a slur used against Jews in the East End. So that the man who shouted ‘Lipski!’ might have been shouting at Schwartz, who apparently has a strongly ‘Jewish’ appearance. Or he might have been shouting to the third man. But either way, he himself was clearly not Jewish, which is a point the Home Office seems to be having a good deal of trouble with, both there and with the graffiti in Goulston Street. I have a theory about that, but Lestrade has forbidden me to pursue it.”
The Angel of the Crows Page 25