Thicke, from his place on the settee, nodded woefully in agreement.
Holmes leaned forward in his chair with anticipation, his eyes glinting fiercely in the light of the table lamp.
“Perhaps, Inspector, I can prevail upon you to begin at the beginning,” he said softly, enunciating each word with great care. “Leave nothing out, I implore you.”
Abberline nodded, sighed deeply, and began:
“Of course it is in all the newspapers, as I am sure you have noted. The sensational press are falling all over one another in their efforts to report the events, and there is scarcely a street corner in London that isn’t emblazoned with a news vendor’s broadsheet upon which the word murder is prominently displayed.” He took a deep breath before continuing. “For a change, the newspapers are correct, I fear. The headlines are no more sensational than they deserve to be. The latest crime, Mr. Holmes, is as hideous and as dreadful as they say it is. Indeed, even more so, because the Fleet Street crowd haven’t printed the worst of it!”
Holmes raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
Abberline shook his head. “Oh, I know, I know. Violent death is no stranger to Whitechapel or to Spitalfields. As I don’t have to tell you, the Spitalfields district is populated with the very lowest of the low: the poor and the very poor and beneath them the utterly destitute — the dregs of society, as they say. Why, crime — crime in its most violent forms — is a way of life there. And life is so cheap, they’ll slit each other’s gullets for a sixpence and think nothing of it.”
Holmes nodded.
“The Evil Quarter-Mile, they call it,” Abberline continued, “and so it is. We have got eighty thousand people packed into the space of a few small acres, most of them unemployed, uneducated, diseased. Many of them surviving like foul dogs from day to day on what scraps they can find in the streets. Most of them without a shred of decency, without even a modicum of self-respect, let alone respect for others. Death is an everyday occurrence, and welcome it is to many! Hardly a day passes when somebody isn’t found floating in the Thames. We pay the river boatmen a shilling a body to bring them in. And many of them are murder victims. They’ll kill each other over a pair of shoes or a piece of bread! Or over nothing at all. Believe me, our chaps have their hands full over there.”
He paused and tugged at an ear. “But of late there has been something new, which is why we” — he nodded toward Thicke — “have been temporarily assigned to the East End, along with a dozen or so other chaps. During the last several months there have been a rash of murders that are distinctly out of the ordinary, that don’t fit the usual pattern — unusually vicious crimes, all committed with a knife, all perpetrated against women, and all of the women being ‘unfortunates,’ as they’re called — common prostitutes with hardly a copper coin to their names. In other words, Mr. Holmes, these murders don’t appear to have any motives, none at all. They appear to have been committed for the thrill of it! The sheer bloody thrill of it, if you’ll pardon my language.”
Holmes interrupted: “You speak of the murders of that Emma Smith woman last Easter Monday and, what was her name, Turner or Tabram, who was found a fortnight ago with, how many? — thirty-nine stab wounds?”
Abberline nodded his head. “Yes, those are the ones. And there have been others as well. You’ve been keeping up with things, I see.”
“It is my business to do so, Inspector,” Holmes responded.
“Yes. Well, we didn’t have a clue for either one of those homicides, not a single clue. And not a reliable witness either — one that would come forward, in any event. At first we thought some soldiers from the nearby Tower garrison or the Wellington Barracks were responsible for the Tabram murder, because the wounds appeared as if they could have been made with a bayonet. And we even made some arrests, but the two lads we had as suspects turned up with ironclad alibis and we had to let them go. And now this... this latest one.”
Abberline removed a pocket notebook from his coat and flipped through the pages, finally coming to the section he was looking for. He cleared his throat.
“At three forty-five on the morning of Friday the thirty-first of August — yesterday — Police Constable John Neil, number 97-J, of H-Division, while in the course of his normal rounds, did come upon in Buck’s Row, the body of a woman lying in the street.” Abberline put the notebook aside and continued in a normal speaking voice. “At first he thought she was just another derelict, unconscious from intoxication — God knows, a normal sight in Spitalfields. He reported he smelled the reek of gin. By the light of his bull’s-eye lantern he could see that she was lying on her back with her eyes open and staring. Her skirt was pushed up to her waist. He felt her arm and it was still warm — ‘warm as a toasted crumpet,’ he said. So he tried to get her to her feet. That’s when he saw that her throat had been cut, and the blood was still oozing out of it. Then he looked closer. The windpipe and gullet had been completely severed, cut back to the spinal cord.”
“My word,” whispered Watson.
“Funny how the mind works sometimes,” continued Abberline. “Neil told me that his first thought was ‘Well, here’s a woman who’s committed suicide!’ Can you believe that? He actually started looking around near the body for the knife she did it with. Then it came to him. She had been murdered.
“Well, as you can imagine, he started up, half expecting to find the murderer lurking in the shadows, the body being still warm and all. He was in the process of making a quick search of the immediate vicinity when he spotted the lantern of his mate who was walking the adjoining beat” — Abberline glanced in his notebook — “Police Constable Haine, number — Oh, I don’t know what it is, but he’s also assigned to H-Division. And just about the same time, another constable by the name of Misen came on the scene. It seems that two passersby on the street came upon the body just before PC Neil — a George Cross and a John Paul, both market porters on their way to work — and they had run to fetch help and came upon Misen patrolling in the next street. Neil must have come by not a minute or two later. Well, in any event, Neil called to Haine to run for the doctor. Fortunately, there’s a surgery close by, and within a quarter of an hour, no more, a Dr. Ralph Llewellyn was on the scene. He made a cursory examination of the woman, confirmed that she was indeed dead — though how she could be anything else with her throat slashed ear to ear, I don’t know — then ordered the body taken to the mortuary adjoining the local workhouse.”
“A cursory examination, you say?” asked Holmes.
“Yes, that’s right. A more thorough job was performed later at the mortuary. The light was so poor in the street, you see. Only the one gaslight on the corner, and the constables’ bull’s-eye lanterns. Don’t know how he could have done more under the circumstances.”
“So there was no search of the area for a weapon or footprints or anything at all that could have been tied to the crime?” Holmes asked.
Abberline shook his head. “No, nothing of the sort. Except, as I said, the first quick look-around that Neil conducted right after discovering the body. Not ideal conditions to find anything.”
“And when daylight came?”
Abberline looked embarrassed. “Well, of course a search was made the next morning, but nothing was found. As for footprints or suchlike, bless you, Mr. Holmes, but Buck’s Row is paved with cobbles. And the muck in the street, as Dr. Watson has so astutely observed on my boots and trousers, was by then so churned up by so many footprints, it would have been useless, quite useless, to even try to isolate the one pair that might have been of any interest to us.”
Holmes looked at him with hooded eyes. “Then the area was not cordoned off?”
“Well, not until after I reached the scene several hours later. And by then, well...”
Holmes shook his head sadly. “Please continue, Inspector.”
“Well, of course we knocked on all the doors facing Buck’s Row and questioned everybody who resides in the vicinity, but most of them wer
e asleep, or so they say, and heard nothing. But you know those people, how suspicious they are of the official police. They’re not likely to share any information with us, even if they did know something.” His voice trailed off. He was noticeably tired and was having difficulty organizing his thoughts.
Holmes prompted him gently: “The body? It had been taken away?”
“Ah, yes. As I said, the body was ordered sent to the mortuary by Dr. Llewellyn, and it was there that a more thorough examination was in due course undertaken. And that’s when we discovered the real horror of the crime.”
Abberline paused to wipe his brow with a handkerchief taken from his sleeve. Holmes and Watson waited expectantly, not making a sound. Only the ticking of the clock could be heard, and the hiss of the gas lamp.
“It was like this,” Abberline said finally. “Dr. Llewellyn returned to his home to get a few more hours of sleep and his breakfast, while the body was stripped and prepared for autopsy. This was done by two inmates of the workhouse to which the mortuary is attached — two regulars, I might add, who have often performed the same service and are well acquainted with the correct procedures: a Robert Mann and a James Hatfield,” he said, referring once again to his notebook. “The lads earn an extra bob or two lending a hand, as it were. You know, doing the dirty work.
“It wasn’t until they were in the process of undressing the body to prepare it for the doctor that the discovery was made.”
He paused. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “She’d been gutted, Mr. Holmes, gutted like a fish!”
Three
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1888
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
— A Case of Identity
They were at the mortuary within the hour. A hastily summoned four-wheeler conveyed them through the night to the slums of the East End, although the cab’s jarvey was most reluctant at first to take them.
“Ye must be daft, or think I am!” he said from his box, shaking his head obstinately. “I’ll not be goin’ there, not at this hour of the night. ‘Tis bad enough in the daytime!”
It took a flashing of police credentials and a most impressive display of Sergeant Thicke’s official manner to change the man’s mind. It did not change his humor. He lapsed into a sullen silence for the duration of the trip, a silence frequently punctuated by venomous over-the-shoulder glances, which expressed his feelings far more eloquently than words.
The ride was not a very long one, the East End of London being separated from the West End more by birthright than distance. It is a squalid, miserable place, a place not so much where one lives as survives, but not always and never easily.
The jarvey, jaw firmly set, pulled up in front of the Whitechapel station of the underground railway, near Brady Street.
“Ye’ll ‘ave to ‘oof it from ‘ere, gents, Metropolitan P’lice or no. I’ll not be taken yer lot any further, and that’s me last word!”
Watson paid him double the fare anyway.
The mortuary, located in Old Montague Street, was but a short walk, but it is a walk into a London few respectable Londoners even knew existed. The area of the East End known as Whitechapel, though in close proximity to the lofty sacred precincts of St. Paul’s, is a low and hellish place, and the few adjoining acres called Spitalfields, which they had now entered, is the lowest level of that hell. No more than a quarter-mile square, the darkened narrow streets and alleyways of Spitalfields contained the worst of London’s slums and the very lowest form of humanity. It had been fifty years since Charles Dickens had described the district in Oliver Twist, yet little had changed for the better, and not even someone with his powers of description could prepare the unwary for the worst of it. Spitalfields was a place that penetrated the soul with feelings of repulsion and dread.8
The stench from the streets was all but overpowering, a witches’ brew of smells: the familiar odors of poverty — garbage, excrement, boiled cabbage and decay, stale beer, cheap gin and unwashed bodies — was intermixed with the stink of coal gas which permeated everything, and the gagging vapors from the slaughterhouses and tanneries and small, run-down factories that were scattered about the area.
They walked quickly, eyes to the ground, detouring when necessary around the occasional small clusters of vagrants, misshapen lumps sleeping huddled in doorways or against the building walls.
Their arrival at the mortuary was almost a welcome relief; the smells there were merely of formaldehyde and lye, strong and gagging but somehow cleansing to the nostrils. Still it was no place for those with delicate stomachs or sensibilities.9
The darkened room into which they were ushered had bare brick walls that were whitewashed once but were now coated with grime and lampblack. What illumination there was came from wall sconces that seemed to give off more smoke than the sickly light, dancing eerily on the ceiling.
The center of the room was taken up by several rectangular wooden tables, only one or two of which were bare. The others were draped with sheets of a rough material under which the lumpy shapes of cadavers reposed. Off to one side were a half dozen or so wicker baskets which at first glance in the dim light appeared to contain small bundles of dirty laundry. They contained the bodies of infants, the day’s collection.
The four of them, Holmes and Watson and the two policemen, were escorted directly and without ceremony to one of the tables located at the far end of the room. A lantern was brought and the sheet pulled back.
“She be identified as one Mary Anne Nicholls,” said a gravelly voice from the shadows, that of a mortuary worker. “Polly Nicholls, she be called, forty-two years old, mother of five, prostitute. Only known address be a doss-house at number 18 Thrawl Street.”
The four of them stood around the table as if transfixed. The face they looked down upon was that of a homely, coarse-featured woman who appeared far older than the stated forty-two years. Her eyes were open.
“Hold the light higher, please, someone!” ordered Holmes, his voice sounding unnaturally loud, even strident.
The wound at the woman’s throat grinned grotesquely in the flickering light. The blood had been wiped away so the lesion was plainly visible. The windpipe and gullet had been totally severed, cut right down to the spinal cord. On the left side of the neck, about an inch below the jaw, there was an incision almost four inches long starting at a point immediately below the ear. On the same side, but an inch below, was a second incision, which ended three inches below the right jaw. The main arteries in the throat had been completely cut through.
“What do you make of these wounds, Watson?”
Watson bent lower over the body. “From the manner in which the carotid arteries are severed, I would say it was done with an extremely sharp instrument, very sharp indeed. And see here: There are no jagged edges, no torn flesh around the throat. A very neat incision. It could have been done with a razor, or a sharp flensing knife of some sort, or even a scalpel, heaven forbid.”
“Mr. Llewellyn, the surgeon,” said Thicke, holding a lantern by Watson’s shoulder, “he thinks it could have been a cork-cutter’s blade or a shoemaker’s knife.”
“I am not all that familiar with either.” Watson shrugged.
Holmes pointed to the right side of the woman’s neck, just under the ear. “The point of entry, you think?”
“Hard to say. Perhaps.” Watson looked closer. “Yes, I think you are right. It would appear to be.”
“Now, look at the bruises here on the face, on the side of the jaw, and on the other side as well. What does that suggest to you?”
Watson took the lamp from Thicke and held it closer. “Yes, I see what you mean. They could be bruises made by fingers, perhaps — by a thumb and forefinger, as if she were held from behind with the assailant’s hand tightly over her mouth, to suppress a scream no doubt.”
“Precisely! To suppress a scream and at the same time to pull her head back and bare her throat. Excell
ent, Watson! And which bruise would you say was made by the thumb?”
“Well, it is impossible to say for certain, but if I had to choose, I would say the one on the right side of her face, this one here. It seems the bigger of the two.”
“Excellent again!”
“What difference could that possibly make, Mr. Holmes?” asked Inspector Abberline.
“Why, it suggests that our assailant was left-handed, Inspector. It would be quite natural for a left-handed person to grab his victim with his right so as to leave the dominant hand free with which to wield the knife.
“Oh, I see. Yes, of course.”
“That is, unless,” said Holmes, “the assailant did not accost her from behind, but — unlikely though it may be — did so facing her, in which case our man is right-handed after all.”
Abberline sighed heavily.
Holmes pulled the covering down farther, baring the woman’s torso.
“Good God!” exclaimed Watson.
Even though they had been forewarned by Abberline, the extent of the mutilations to the woman’s lower body was horrifying. Holmes and Watson had both seen many corpses over the years — Holmes had been a student of anatomy with what Watson once referred to as “an accurate but unsystematic knowledge” of the subject, and Watson, as an army surgeon, had beheld many terrible wounds — but neither of them had ever seen anything like this. Nor had the two veteran police detectives, if the tightness around their mouths was any indication.10
A deep gash, starting in the lower left part of the woman’s abdomen, ran in a jagged manner almost as far as the diaphragm. It was very, very deep, so deep that part of the intestines protruded through the tissue. There were several smaller incisions running across the abdomen, and three or four other cuts running downward on the other side.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors Page 3