Vats could not believe it. “But—but something like that could never be presented to the queen!”
“Exactly—which leads us to believe it was never meant for Queen Victoria. That merchant, Felix Rhineman, collected the money, had a cheap statue gold-plated and encrusted with imitation diamonds, then dropped word at a place where thieves like Hogarth and Slackly would hear of it. There was no danger from his standpoint. Even if they discovered after the robbery that the statue was a fake, they could hardly report it to the police.”
“And Rhineman kept the money he collected,” I said. “He made a handsome profit and Queen Victoria never really lost anything.”
Simon Ark nodded. “The only losers were those five women who carried parts of Hogarth’s map.”
“Why did Slackly have to kill them, Simon? Especially the way he did?”
Simon Ark took out the parchment map and held it to the light. “This is not the usual parchment, my friend, made from the skin of a sheep or goat. Slackly mutilated their bodies after strangling them so the missing pieces of flesh would go unnoticed. You see, Hogarth paid those poor women to let him tattoo the five parts of his map on their skin.”
—
After that Simon walked for a long time with Inspector Flaver. Then Simon and I departed, leaving Ceritus and his rival Rood with Glenda Coxe and the inspector. “But who killed Nesbett Coxe?” I asked on the drive back. “You never solved it, Simon!”
“My friend, I am not a detective, much as you would like to make me one. I am merely a wanderer, searching the world for evil. At times I find it in unlikely places. At times I find it in the eyes of a twelve-year-old child grown to adulthood.”
“You mean—?”
“The story of the Ripper’s treasure was either true or false. On the basis of what we found here, we concluded it was true, to the best of Raymond Slackly’s knowledge when he wrote the journal. But if the journal is true, we must believe that Glenda Coxe found it where she said—in her father’s attic trunk. Now her uncle told us yesterday that her house burned down when she was twelve. She lost everything, including her parents. Therefore her discovery of Slackly’s journal and the map must have come before that fire!”
“Perhaps,” I was willing to grant.
“Not perhaps, but certainly! And can you imagine the effect this discovery would have on a child of that impressionable age? Her great-grandfather—the most terrible murderer in London’s history! We know it had an effect on her, because she kept it a secret all these years till now.”
But I shook my head. “There’s a flaw in your reasoning, Simon. Suppose she found the journal some time before the fire, as you say. It would still have burned up, unless she deliberately removed it from the house before the fire.”
“Exactly, my friend.”
“You mean she burned down her own house? Killed her own—?”
“And now resurrected the journal to kill again, in such a way that Vats or Rood would be blamed for it. She needed two suspects, in case one of them could prove an alibi for last night. Remember that back door to her laboratory? An easy way out, and back in, while her coworkers thought she never left the building.”
“And you told all this to Inspector Flaver?”
“I did. The proof is up to him. I believe he’ll start with the fire fifteen years ago.”
“And the map, Simon?”
“I think it will go into Scotland Yard’s files, along with the journal. Someday, perhaps, when there is not already enough horror in the world, it can be revealed.”
We drove on toward London, and that was the last I ever heard of the treasure of Jack the Ripper.
The Hands of Mr. Ottermole
THOMAS BURKE
Although anyone remotely familiar with the Jack the Ripper murders is fully aware that the weapon of choice was a knife, the killings inspired other writers to produce works about serial killers who may have used different weapons. One such story is “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” by Sydney Thomas Burke (1886–1945), which was voted the best detective short story of all time in 1949 by Ellery Queen and a panel of eleven other mystery writers.
Burke was born in the London suburb of Clapham, but when he was only a few months old his father died and he was sent to the East End to live with his uncle until the age of ten, when he was put into a home for respectable middle-class children without means. He sold his first story, “The Bellamy Diamonds,” when he was fifteen. His first book, Nights in Town: A London Autobiography, was published in 1915, soon followed by the landmark volume Limehouse Nights (1916), a collection of stories that had originally been published in the magazines The English Review, Colour, and The New Witness. This volume of romantic but violent stories of the Chinese district of London was enormously popular, but, though largely praised by critics, there were objections to the depictions of interracial relationships, opium use, and other “depravities.”
Several of the stories in Limehouse Nights served as the basis for films, most notably D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), based on “The Chink and the Child.” It starred one of America’s most beloved actresses, Lillian Gish, as the daughter of a sadistic prizefighter, and Richard Barthelmess as a kind Chinese youth. Charlie Chaplin based his silent movie A Dog’s Life (1918) on material from the book.
“The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” was first published in the author’s collection The Pleasantries of Old Quong (London, Constable, 1931); it was published in the United States as A Tea-Shop in Limehouse (Boston, Little, Brown, 1931).
THE HANDS OF MR. OTTERMOLE
Thomas Burke
At six o’clock of a January evening Mr. Whybrow was walking home through the cobweb alleys of London’s East End. He had left the golden clamor of the great High Street to which the tram had brought him from the river and his daily work, and was now in the chessboard of byways that is called Mallon End. None of the rush and gleam of the High Street trickled into these byways. A few paces south—a flood tide of life, foaming and beating. Here—only slow-shuffling figures and muffled pulses. He was in the sink of London, the last refuge of European vagrants.
As though in tune with the street’s spirit, he too walked slowly, with head down. It seemed that he was pondering some pressing trouble, but he was not. He had no trouble. He was walking slowly because he had been on his feet all day, and he was bent in abstraction because he was wondering whether the Missis would have herrings for his tea, or haddock; and he was trying to decide which would be the more tasty on a night like this. A wretched night it was, of damp and mist, and the mist wandered into his throat and his eyes, and the damp had settled on pavement and roadway, and where the sparse lamplight fell it sent up a greasy sparkle that chilled one to look at. By contrast it made his speculations more agreeable, and made him ready for that tea—whether herring or haddock. His eye turned from the glum bricks that made his horizon, and went forward half a mile. He saw a gas-lit kitchen, a flamy fire, and a spread tea table. There was toast in the hearth and a singing kettle on the side and a piquant effusion of herrings, or maybe of haddock, or perhaps sausages. The vision gave his aching feet a throb of energy. He shook imperceptible damp from his shoulders, and hastened towards its reality.
But Mr. Whybrow wasn’t going to get any tea that evening—or any other evening. Mr. Whybrow was going to die. Somewhere within a hundred yards of him another man was walking; a man much like Mr. Whybrow and much like any other man, but without the only quality that enables mankind to live peaceably together and not as madmen in a jungle. A man with a dead heart eating into itself and bringing forth the foul organisms that arise from death and corruption. And that thing in man’s shape, on a whim or a settled idea—one cannot know—had said within himself that Mr. Whybrow should never taste another herring. Not that Mr. Whybrow had injured him. Not that he had any dislike of Mr. Whybrow. Indeed, he knew nothing of him save as a familiar figure about the streets. But, moved by a force that had taken possession of his empty cells, he had picked
on Mr. Whybrow with that blind choice that makes us pick one restaurant table that has nothing to mark it from four or five other tables, or one apple from a dish of half a dozen equal apples; or that drives Nature to send a cyclone upon one corner of this planet, and destroy five hundred lives in that corner, and leave another five hundred in the same corner unharmed. So this man had picked on Mr. Whybrow, as he might have picked on you or me, had we been within his daily observation; and even now he was creeping through the blue-toned streets, nursing his large white hands, moving ever closer to Mr. Whybrow’s tea table, and so closer to Mr. Whybrow himself.
He wasn’t, this man, a bad man. Indeed, he had many of the social and amiable qualities, and passed as a respectable man, as most successful criminals do. But the thought had come into his moldering mind that he would like to murder somebody, and, as he held no fear of God or man, he was going to do it, and would then go home to his tea. I don’t say that flippantly, but as a statement of fact. Strange as it may seem to the humane, murderers must and do sit down to meals after a murder. There is no reason why they shouldn’t, and many reasons why they should. For one thing, they need to keep their physical and mental vitality at full beat for the business of covering their crime. For another, the strain of their effort makes them hungry, and satisfaction at the accomplishment of a desired thing brings a feeling of relaxation towards human pleasures. It is accepted among non-murderers that the murderer is always overcome by fear for his safety and horror at his act; but this type is rare. His own safety is, of course, his immediate concern, but vanity is a marked quality of most murderers, and that, together with the thrill of conquest, makes him confident that he can secure it, and when he has restored his strength with food he goes about securing it as a young hostess goes about the arranging of her first big dinner—a little anxious, but no more. Criminologists and detectives tell us that every murderer, however intelligent or cunning, always makes one slip in his tactics—one little slip that brings the affair home to him. But that is only half true. It is true only of the murderers who are caught. Scores of murderers are not caught: therefore scores of murderers do not make any mistake at all. This man didn’t.
As for horror or remorse, prison chaplains, doctors, and lawyers have told us that of murderers they have interviewed under condemnation and the shadow of death, only one here and there has expressed any contrition for his act, or shown any sign of mental misery. Most of them display only exasperation at having been caught when so many have gone undiscovered, or indignation at being condemned for a perfectly reasonable act. However normal and humane they may have been before the murder, they are utterly without conscience after it. For what is conscience? Simply a polite nickname for superstition, which is a polite nickname for fear. Those who associate remorse with murder are, no doubt, basing their ideas on the world legend of the remorse of Cain, or are projecting their own frail minds into the mind of the murderer, and getting false reactions. Peaceable folk cannot hope to make contact with this mind, for they are not merely different in mental type from the murderer: they are different in their personal chemistry and construction. Some men can and do kill, not one man, but two or three, and go calmly about their daily affairs. Other men could not, under the most agonizing provocation, bring themselves even to wound. It is men of this sort who imagine the murderer in torments of remorse and fear of the law, whereas he is actually sitting down to his tea.
The man with the large white hands was as ready for his tea as Mr. Whybrow was, but he had something to do before he went to it. When he had done that something, and made no mistake about it, he would be even more ready for it, and would go to it as comfortably as he went to it the day before, when his hands were stainless.
Walk on, then, Mr. Whybrow, walk on; and as you walk, look your last upon the familiar features of your nightly journey. Follow your jack-o’-lantern tea table. Look well upon its warmth and color and kindness; feed your eyes with it, and tease your nose with its gentle domestic odors; for you will never sit down to it. Within ten minutes’ pacing of you a pursuing phantom has spoken in his heart, and you are doomed. There you go—you and phantom—two nebulous dabs of mortality, moving through green air along pavements of powder blue, the one to kill, the other to be killed. Walk on. Don’t annoy your burning feet by hurrying, for the more slowly you walk, the longer you will breathe the green air of this January dusk, and see the dreamy lamplight and the little shops, and hear the agreeable commerce of the London crowd and the haunting pathos of the street organ. These things are dear to you, Mr. Whybrow. You don’t know it now, but in fifteen minutes you will have two seconds to realize how inexpressibly dear they are.
Walk on, then, across this crazy chessboard. You are in Lagos Street now, among the tents of the wanderers of Eastern Europe. A minute or so, and you are in Loyal Lane, among the lodging houses that shelter the useless and the beaten of London’s camp followers. The lane holds the smell of them, and its soft darkness seems heavy with the wail of the futile. But you are not sensitive to impalpable things, and you plod through it, unseeing, as you do every evening, and come to Blean Street, and plod through that. From basement to sky rise the tenements of an alien colony. Their windows slot the ebony of their walls with lemon. Behind those windows strange life is moving, dressed with forms that are not of London or of England, yet, in essence, the same agreeable life that you have been living, and tonight will live no more. From high above you comes a voice crooning The Song of Katta. Through a window you see a family keeping a religious rite. Through another you see a woman pouring out tea for her husband. You see a man mending a pair of boots; a mother bathing her baby. You have seen all these things before, and never noticed them. You do not notice them now, but if you knew that you were never going to see them again, you would notice them. You never will see them again, not because your life has run its natural course, but because a man whom you have often passed in the street has at his own solitary pleasure decided to usurp the awful authority of nature, and destroy you. So perhaps it’s as well that you don’t notice them, for your part in them is ended. No more for you these pretty moments of our earthly travail: only one moment of terror, and then a plunging darkness.
Closer to you this shadow of massacre moves, and now he is twenty yards behind you. You can hear his footfall, but you do not turn your head. You are familiar with footfalls. You are in London, in the easy security of your daily territory, and footfalls behind you, your instinct tells you, are no more than a message of human company.
But can’t you hear something in those footfalls—something that goes with a widdershins beat? Something that says: Look out, look out. Beware, beware. Can’t you hear the very syllables of mur-der-er, mur-der-er? No; there is nothing in footfalls. They are neutral. The foot of villainy falls with the same quiet note as the foot of honesty. But those footfalls, Mr. Whybrow, are bearing on to you a pair of hands, and there is something in hands. Behind you that pair of hands is even now stretching its muscles in preparation for your end. Every minute of your days you have been seeing human hands. Have you ever realized the sheer horror of hands—those appendages that are a symbol for our moments of trust and affection and salutation? Have you thought of the sickening potentialities that lie within the scope of that five-tentacled member? No, you never have; for all the human hands that you have seen have been stretched to you in kindness or fellowship. Yet, though the eyes can hate, and the lips can sting, it is only that dangling member that can gather the accumulated essence of evil, and electrify it into currents of destruction. Satan may enter into man by many doors, but in the hands alone can he find the servants of his will.
Another minute, Mr. Whybrow, and you will know all about the horror of human hands.
You are nearly home now. You have turned into your street—Caspar Street—and you are in the center of the chessboard. You can see the front window of your little four-roomed house. The street is dark, and its three lamps give only a smut of light that is more confusing th
an darkness. It is dark—empty, too. Nobody about; no lights in the front parlors of the houses, for the families are at tea in their kitchens; and only a random glow in a few upper rooms occupied by lodgers. Nobody about but you and your following companion, and you don’t notice him. You see him so often that he is never seen. Even if you turned your head and saw him, you would only say “Good evening” to him, and walk on. A suggestion that he was a possible murderer would not even make you laugh. It would be too silly.
And now you are at your gate. And now you have found your door key. And now you are in, and hanging up your hat and coat. The Missis has just called a greeting from the kitchen, whose smell is an echo of that greeting (herrings!) and you have answered it, when the door shakes under a sharp knock.
Go away, Mr. Whybrow. Go away from that door. Don’t touch it. Get right away from it. Get out of the house. Run with the Missis to the back garden, and over the fence. Or call the neighbors. But don’t touch that door. Don’t, Mr. Whybrow, don’t open…
Mr. Whybrow opened the door.
—
That was the beginning of what became known as London’s Strangling Horrors. Horrors they were called because they were something more than murders: they were motiveless, and there was an air of black magic about them. Each murder was committed at a time when the street where the bodies were found was empty of any perceptible or possible murderer. There would be an empty alley. There would be a policeman at its end. He would turn his back on the empty alley for less than a minute. Then he would look round and run into the night with news of another strangling. And in any direction he looked nobody to be seen and no report to be had of anybody being seen. Or he would be on duty in a long-quiet street, and suddenly be called to a house of dead people whom a few seconds earlier he had seen alive. And, again, whichever way he looked nobody to be seen; and although police whistles put an immediate cordon around the area, and searched all houses, no possible murderer to be found.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 127