The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘They’ve got something to hide, that’s for sure,’ remarked Mrs Wills. Minutes passed. Then the door opened. ‘You can come in. I’ve persuaded him,’ said Mrs Wilkinson. She was plainly dressed, with a tight bun at the back of her head. They followed her down an unlit passageway to the kitchen. ‘In here,’ she said. ‘The parlour fire’s not lit.’

  The room was warm, clean and tidy. Mrs Wilkinson swept some men’s shirts from a wooden rail in front of the fire and began to fold them. There was no other sign of her husband. Charlotte introduced herself and Mrs Wills. Mrs Wills said to the woman, busily folding shirts with her back turned, ‘Well, my dear, we’ve come about these horrible murders. Where is Mr Wilkinson?’

  ‘Upstairs in bed, ill,’ she said.

  ‘Your husband’s nephew, young Albert, said it was you that was ill,’ Mrs Wills remarked forthrightly. A clock ticked loudly on the mantelpiece above the kitchen range. After a silence Mrs Wilkinson turned round. ‘I don’t know what he said. Why are you here? What do you want?’

  ‘You were expecting the police,’ Mrs Wills said implacably. ‘Miss Holmes and myself must come as something of a relief to you, seeing as we aren’t wearing blue uniforms with shiny buttons on them. Unless you were expecting somebody worse than that.’

  ‘I don’t know what all this is about,’ Mrs Wilkinson said hopelessly.

  ‘You’d better make us a cup of tea, dear, and sit down and talk to us,’ Mrs Wills said comfortably. ‘Or let me make it.’ She busied herself with kettle and tea. Mrs Wilkinson sat down and looked at Charlotte fearfully.

  ‘Your husband is in very deep, and you know it,’ Charlotte told her. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘Then, Maria, call me Charlotte. This has gone too far, my dear, and you know that really. Your husband is hiding upstairs, hoping to avoid the consequences of what he has done. You can’t protect him any more. You must call him down to talk to me. You know, I think, there has been another murder in Whitechapel. And you can see that if I, a detective operating in a private capacity, have found you, it will not be long before the police, or an even more terrifying person, the murderer himself, does the same.’

  The kitchen door inched open and a voice said weakly, ‘All right. I’m here.’ A figure hobbled in.

  Stanley Wilkinson was a man in his sixties, red-eyed and unshaven. He wore a plaid dressing-gown and slippers. His face, grey-stubbled, was tired and anxious.

  ‘Sit down and spill the beans, Mr Wilkinson,’ said Mrs Wills firmly. ‘Here’s a nice cup of tea for you.’

  ‘Tell them, Stan,’ said his wife wearily. ‘Otherwise I shall have to get the police.’

  Sitting at the kitchen table in Gravesend, Stanley Wilkinson told Charlotte and Mrs Wills his terrible story, and its terrible aftermath. At the end of the tale Charlotte knew, or thought she did, where to find the notorious Whitechapel murderer.

  ‘As you will know, ladies,’ Wilkinson began, ‘Hand and Flower Street is not the most select street in London. It must be one of the poorest, and where there’s poverty, crime and vice flourish. So I must confess that keeping a lodging house in the place I’m speaking of encourages a man to help and support all manner of wicked things. And this I have done. I did it guiltily, from need, for what other choice did I have, crippled as I am? The landlord lives in the West End and takes his rent with a clear conscience from the landlord’s agent, who visits once a month in daylight. But I, managing the building, and living there, have, I am ashamed to say, harboured wanted men, on occasion, or hidden stolen property – and needless to say I’ve given shelter to many an unfortunate, a woman of easy virtue. It’s not hard for a house such as the one I manage to become a thieves’ kitchen, or worse. It’s harder to prevent it.’

  His wife said, ‘Don’t beat about the bush for our sakes, Stanley. We understand that bad women came to the house with men. Tell your story.’

  Stanley Wilkinson nodded, said, ‘All right. From time to time, yes, I’d allow in a woman with the man who was paying her and, yes, she would tip me a sum over and above the usual rent for the room. Most of the time I rented the rooms out honestly, four or five to a room, women in some, men in others, kitchen downstairs used in common, and I took my fourpences and fivepences and was grateful. I had no wish to run a brothel, or to get arrested for doing it. But it happened that back in July I had a brush with a horse and cart and was flung over in the street. This gave me more trouble with my bad leg and I found myself short of money because of the doctor’s bills. It was at that point that a man came to me wishing to rent out my top back room on a regular basis – no one else to be admitted when he wasn’t there – and he would use this room, he said, for purposes I was not to enquire into and pay me well for it. The sum he offered me was enormous compared with what I could have got renting it at the ordinary rate. It was two-and-a-half guineas a week.’

  ‘A good deal,’ commented Charlotte. ‘What did the man look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I never saw his face,’ said Stanley Wilkinson.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He came at night, after dark, and always wore a mask. It was a good, well-made mask, of fine rubber. I have never seen anything like it before. It was very pale, making his face chalk white. I think his eyes were brown. On his head he wore a black slouch hat, well pulled down. His collar was always pulled up. He wore a black cape, though it was summer, and always arrived by cab. Few would have seen, from a distance, anything peculiar about his face. For me, meeting him sometimes on the stairs, so white, with those blazing eyes – it was horrible. Worse, of course, because I came to realise what he was doing there, in my back room. He had a front door key and came only at weekends …’ Here, Stanley hesitated.

  ‘Get to the woman,’ Mrs Wills said, with the voice of experience.

  ‘Very well,’ he said despondently. ‘I must. My tenant, as I’ll call him – he never gave me a name – would arrive – ’

  ‘Before we get to that,’ interrupted Charlotte, ‘what was he like in stature and bearing?’

  ‘Taller than average, lean, I would think, though his cape concealed much. His bearing was that of a prosperous man, a man who had never wanted for food or fire, who knew he had a voice in the affairs of men, if I can put it like that. He had a powerful, intimidating presence. Perhaps without that I would have asked him to leave when I became uneasy – but,’ Wilkinson said, breaking off, ‘it’s too late for that now.’

  ‘It is,’ Mrs Wills said grimly.

  ‘He would come then, at weekends, and let himself in with his key, often quite late, at ten or eleven o’clock. On occasion I would see him going upstairs to the room he rented with his companion. Once or twice one of the other lodgers saw him. Cath Eddowes saw him and nicknamed him “The Ghost of Cooney’s”. It became something of a joke among the women. They do joke, you see, when there’s anything to joke about. They’d say, “Where’s my comb?” and another would respond, “I expect the ghost took it to comb his ghostly hair” – that sort of thing. They’d all laugh.’ Stanley Wilkinson dropped his head and gasped.

  ‘Do not sob, Mr Wilkinson,’ Charlotte said firmly. ‘Some of the women are dead, no doubt, but nothing can help them now. We must work to ensure no more die, and that this murderer is caught. Now – your lodger plainly had a companion, a woman. What did she look like?’

  ‘I never saw her properly either, not until – the end. She was of medium height, young, wore black. She was always heavily veiled. She never spoke. Something in her walk and the way she held her head made me think she came of a higher class than you’d expect to find at Cooney’s. She was more of a lady.’

  ‘Why on earth would a pair like that patronise your premises?’ asked Mrs Wills.

  ‘Partly so no one they knew would recognise them, I suppose,’ said Wilkinson. ‘But that wasn’t the only reason. It was the noises you see – what they did.’ He hesitated, looking at Charlotte and Mrs Wills. ‘Even Maria can hardly believe
…’

  ‘I think Mrs Wills and I both know what you mean,’ Charlotte said smoothly. ‘He was in the habit, was he, of using violent practices in the course of their relations? That, presumably, was what led to the disaster?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ sighed Mrs Wills. ‘Oh, my God.’

  ‘He had a black bag with him he always brought,’ Wilkinson said. ‘Of course I thought it was their luggage, their own things – not so. Well, it wasn’t long before it became plain to anybody on that top floor what was going on. He was beating her with a whip. She was groaning.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know what gets into people. I couldn’t let out the top room opposite his when he was there. I had to rent out my own and sleep up there myself. And half the time with the noise I couldn’t stay there. I’d end up spending the night in my own kitchen, along with whatever transients I’d rented out a corner to. Then came the bad night. I’d been in the kitchen, trying to sleep. It was a terrible night in early August, hot and full of thunder. Then at one o’clock, the screams began. For a full five minutes we all tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Then we knew we had to go upstairs. Polly Nichols was in the kitchen with us, drunk and sitting in a chair.’

  ‘Who ran? Who saw?’ Charlotte demanded urgently.

  ‘Polly and an old man sleeping in the kitchen. And Martha Tabram, Annie Chapman and Mary Kelly – they were sharing the front room on the next floor. There was an Irishman, we called him Red Paddy. And another unfortunate, name of Flo Robinson. I hardly knew what I was doing – I’d had a drop to help me sleep. I was tired and fuddled. The house was dark. I set off upstairs with Paddy. Polly followed on, screaming and moaning herself. The awful sounds went on. On the next landing there were the women, those I’ve named, and a lot of gabbling – “Better go up there,” “My God, what’s he done to her?” and so forth. We hesitated, not sure what to do and a bit afraid to go upstairs. And then the screaming stopped. Paddy said to me, “Come on, then.” As we were about to take the last flight of stairs the man himself pushed through us on the landing and ran down at great speed. Then we ran upstairs. By that stage Mary Kelly had lit the gas on the top landing so we could see. I think I heard the front door bang but I hardly noticed. Because we were standing in the doorway of the back room, looking in. There was a gas mantle by the fireplace so we could see the figure of the poor young woman lying on the bed. It was a single bed with iron rails at either end. She was chained, legs spread-eagled, arms above her head. She was naked of course and bruised. Her face was a mess – and he’d completed the job by cutting her throat. There was blood everywhere. It had shot up all around. She was drenched with it. I won’t forget those staring eyes in that white face – it was grey, really, except for the blood running from her nose. He’d broken it. He’d got out of control, it was obvious, gone over the limit, so to speak, she’d started to scream and he’d killed her to shut her up. We gradually drifted in to take in the details. Her body was covered with whip marks and little slashes he must have made with his knife before he’d lost control and had to end her life. She was under thirty, that’s for sure.’ Wilkinson fell silent, unable to say more.

  His wife whispered, ‘Poor young woman. Poor thing.’

  ‘Dirty, murdering bastard,’ was Mrs Wills’s comment. ‘Who was she? Did you find out?’

  ‘The police did,’ Wilkinson said. ‘I couldn’t let it out I’d been renting the room out regularly to a man like that – I’d have done two years’ hard labour and at my age, with my leg, it’d have killed me. And none of the women wanted a murder investigation, giving evidence in court and all that. They were too low down for all that. The law, the police, justice done and seen to be done – all that’s for people who still have some ambition and some hope for better times and a better world. You know,’ he appealed to Mrs Wills.

  ‘I do,’ she responded. ‘So you all agreed to tell a false story. And no doubt you greased the women’s palms for them.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I paid them. My only fear then was that they’d come back for more money. If only that had been the worst I had to fear. Then, less than a week later, they found Martha Tabram – she’d been there that night – dead of thirty or forty stab wounds on a landing in Whitechapel. That was nasty, but tarts get murdered, that’s what I told myself. Then came Polly Nichols, dead and disembowelled with a long knife up against a fence, two weeks later and half a mile away from where Martha died. And so it went on, woman after woman murdered. Elizabeth Stride wasn’t even there that night. That made it all the more terrifying. Was the murderer killing women who hadn’t even seen him? What was going on? Did he think someone had told Stride what happened? Or is he just growing viler and more vile, and more frightened? I don’t know. I wish I’d gone to the police there and then, when we found the dead woman.’

  ‘You did, though?’ questioned Charlotte.

  ‘Yes. But not with the truth. We all cleared up the room, leaving only the woman’s clothes, unchained her, of course, put a knife in her hand and fetched the police. I said, oh dear, oh dear, I’d rented the room to a poor passer-by, little knowing she was going to make an end of herself. They found her to be a discharged governess, first seduced by an employer, forced by destitution to go on the streets. She had two convictions for soliciting – none, of course, after she met our friend of the whip and the knife. A familiar enough story – down and down, then suicide. The police asked few questions. The man keeping her, I suppose, is a man with a position to maintain, no doubt, and a wife to be kept in ignorance.’

  ‘And dark desires, which are growing worse,’ added Mrs Wills.

  ‘And now I fear for myself,’ he said.

  ‘Because you saw his face as he ran downstairs?’ asked Charlotte.

  ‘I did,’ he replied. ‘But it was dark and we were blundering about in panic. It was only an impression.’

  ‘What did you do with the items you took from the room?’

  ‘Put everything in his black bag, which was sufficiently weighted by the chains to sink into the river when I threw it off a dock.’

  ‘Tell me what went into the bag,’ she said.

  ‘The whip, chains, a pair of handcuffs, some scraps of paper, that’s all. Oh, and the mask.’

  ‘No clothing belonging to the man?’

  ‘None,’ he said. ‘Presumably he stayed dressed during these episodes. When the moment came to escape he only had to throw on his hat and wrap himself in his cape.’

  ‘And the pieces of paper?’

  ‘Just a page from a notebook, a ticket from Baker Street for the underground train, half an envelope with, I think, some tobacco in it – very little tobacco, just a few bits,’ said Wilkinson, grappling for memories. ‘It’s all at the bottom of the Thames now.’

  ‘I thought you said he arrived in a cab, always,’ Charlotte said.

  ‘That was when I saw him. Perhaps sometimes he did not take a cab, or the lady did not, but came to Whitechapel on the underground train.’

  ‘A curious thought,’ Charlotte mused. Then she looked hard at Wilkinson. ‘We cannot find this man on the basis of what you have said. We will have to entrap him. You must help. Otherwise neither you nor your wife nor half the women in Whitechapel will be safe. You must come back to Whitechapel, then spread the word in the neighbourhood that you have a bad conscience about a crime which occurred in the summer and that you are about to go to the police with the whole story. And we will lie in wait for the monster, who is certain to come for you to stop your tongue. When he arrives he will find Scotland Yard waiting for him.’

  It was very cold and dark in the top back room at Cooney’s Lodging House in Hand and Flower Street, Whitechapel. Charlotte sat on the mattress-less truckle bed on which the seduced governess had met her bloody end while Inspector Lestrade, also in his coat, was on the floor by the door in a stupor of cold. Three nights had passed in this way, waiting for the murderer to come for Stanley Wilkinson, who was ensconced downstairs by the kitchen fire. That he was sharing the room
with ragged men and women and probably a flea-bitten dog or two, that the kitchen was filthy and infested, did not prevent Charlotte and Lestrade from envying him. There was light there, and he was warm.

  ‘You may wish now Sherlock had continued to forbid you to step into Whitechapel with me,’ Lestrade said from the floor.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Charlotte replied. ‘It was I who found Wilkinson and I am entitled to be in at the kill.’ They were muttering so as not to be heard.

  ‘I doubt if he thinks you’re sitting up all night waiting for the murderer,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘How many times must I tell you, Jules, the fact that Sherlock is my brother gives him no right to dictate what I do or do not do.’

  ‘I wish you’d let me join you on the bed,’ Jules said.

  ‘We know what that led to last night,’ Charlotte responded shortly. There was a silence. Both were becoming tired and irritable.

  Jules said, ‘Is there no hope for me?’

  Charlotte replied, ‘Not while we are waiting for Jack the Ripper to arrive.’

  ‘If he ever does.’

  Charlotte said nothing.

  A thick, yellow fog was coming down, a real London pea-souper. It fingered in through the cracks in the window and filled the room with acrid-smelling yellow air. It had been some time since the normal sounds of the neighbourhood had ceased. Now there was complete silence broken only occasionally by a shout from the main road. In the distance they could hear foghorns hooting on the river.

  Lestrade stood up and stretched. ‘The fog could make it hard for the men watching the house,’ he said to Charlotte.

  ‘It might induce the madman to come out,’ Charlotte pointed out. ‘He must be desperate to get rid of Wilkinson, but he may have seen signs the house is watched. He may take advantage of the fog – ’ She broke off as a bang came from downstairs clearly up to them. It had been agreed that would be the signal the Wilkinsons would give when the murderer entered the house.

  Lestrade, whispering, ‘He’s here,’ went quickly to the window, uncovered the lantern lying on the floor beneath it and signalled to the constable who should have been waiting in the yard beyond the house. There was no returning signal, or if there was, the fog was too thick for Lestrade to see it. Meanwhile Charlotte had pressed herself against the wall near the door hinges. As the footsteps of the man they thought to be the Whitechapel murderer arrived at the landing on the floor below, Lestrade put down the lantern and signalled to Charlotte that he could get no replying flash. He then took up a position in the middle of the room.