“And I do not care one whit more about these tiresome empyrean arrangements,” he said with a dismissive wave of a long, lean hand. It struck me for the first time that he had a conductor’s hands, incredibly communicative when his face so often was not.
“I merely point out what is of more interest to me than the subject matter of the Baron’s speculations: that new ideas are often roundly rejected. I suspect that the theories of Baron von Krafft-Ebing are of more immediate use to me and my work than any roundabout made by heavenly bodies for untold millennia.”
I could not restrain a “tsk” of exasperation. That a man of scientific bent in the minutiae of evidence to be discerned by a microscope could ignore the magnificent yet grossly visible and daily dance of the planets and stars struck me as beyond belief.
Holmes shrugged and offered one of his rare, charming smiles, which were usually exerted with nervous clients and not myself.
“I am a reprobate, Watson, when it comes to matters which have no bearing on the intimate course of my investigations. However, I am willing to learn. And it appears that this Krafft-Ebing has, in his much-loathed and yet eagerly devoured book, described a legion of Jack the Rippers.”
I began to page through it looking for an assemblage of words that would translate most readily to my stumbling eye. “How did you come across this book?”
“It was a gift.”
I looked up amazed. Holmes received payment, sometimes in the form of costly trinkets from rich and titled persons, never anything as personal as mere “gifts.”
His lips remained firmly shut, an expression that a stick of dynamite could not blast open, but I detected a dampened smile. A smug dampened smile.
“So you believe that this bizarre book will aid you in finding the Ripper, who appears to have finished his work with the ending of last year and has vanished into the foul mists from which he came.”
Holmes’s eyes narrowed, perhaps from the rank smoke the old clay bowl heaved up like Vesuvius.
“This is as foul a trail as I have ever followed, Watson, and already I know of decent women who have been devastated by it. I find that makes my blood boil. I am even finding the brutal despoilation of indecent women making my blood boil. No honest Englishman should tolerate what has been made of Whitechapel, both before and after Jack the Ripper. I mean to have him. That may require me to delve into deeper, darker matters than I ever have before, and you know my appetite for human horror, for the axe murderers and acid poisoners and all manner of human depravity. This Ripper has reached a new level of atrocity. I will understand it. I will understand him. And I will catch him. Are you game to go with me?”
“Of course, Holmes. I brought my old service revolver.”
Holmes smiled, tightly. “Bullets may be our least line of defense against what will come. But it is heartening to know you stand with me on this.”
4.
Pitiless Whitechapel
Here I am noble; I am boyar. The common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not—and to know not is to care not for.
—THE COUNT TO JONATHAN HARKER, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA
FROM THE NOTES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M. D.
Before we left on our unwholesome errand, Holmes had changed into one of the lounge suits that were becoming popular on the streets of London, an American habit, I believe, that no Harley Street physician would dare adapt, nor even a lowly Paddington doctor. The jacket lacked the flourishes of city attire: coat skirts or tails. In that respect it resembled the more casual dress worn at sporting events, save it was constructed in decent, sober black wool rather than loose-woven linen or sackcloth.
“I am told, Watson, that supposed gentlemen amble among the greasy lanes of Whitechapel, though all I have thus far seen there are would-be gentlemen tricked out in bits and pieces of their betters’ attire, rather like the unfortunates themselves in their velvet-trimmed bonnets.”
The hansom had left us off where Holmes had directed, at Fairclough and Berner Streets. The jointure of those two names brought a shudder to my sturdy frame, for they often figured in newspaper stories of various evils.
“You suspect a gentleman of the Ripper slayings?” I asked, keeping my tone low against eavesdroppers and my hands in my pockets against thieves.
“I? No. But that is the current fashionable theory among the Fleet Street speculators who pass themselves off as journalists. It is not bad enough that a homicidal monster stalks the alleyways; he must be a man of privilege and position. If I had a farthing, Watson, for all the far-fetched tales constructed around the acts of Jack the Ripper, I could…well, I could afford a finer blend of shag.”
I coughed a bit at inhaling the foul stew that passed for air among these twisted byways. “What do you need of me?”
“You have no acquaintanceship of Whitechapel?”
“I am a married man, Holmes!”
“It was not always thus, Watson.”
“No, but even then I should never find my way to Whitechapel. The disease potential alone would dissuade any man of sensibility.”
“We are not looking for a man of sensibility.” Holmes paused beneath one of the too-few gaslights to study the street. “We are hunting a man who revels in the opposite. That does not mean he cannot sleep on silken sheets elsewhere.”
“And the Ripper letters?”
“Are they indeed from the monster? Possibly. But why then the Americanisms and the mock Cockney phonetics?” He gazed around the ill-lit scene, people lurching beyond the honest circle of gaslight like supernumeraries in some contemporary vision of urban hell. “I understand the opium addict, Watson. The drug brings phantoms, illusions. It makes pain seem like pleasure, for a while. I do not understand the men who come here looking for that particular delusion as any kind of surcease, or illusion of pleasure.”
I followed his gaze to a staggering woman across the way.
She was a creature of the ignored and much-abused homeless classes: thick of frame with poor nutriance, thick of mind thanks to too many tankards, about as feminine as that quality is experienced in a drawing room as an andiron. To a physician, a walking cesspool of disease and decay. No wonder they were known as “unfortunates.”
“Why bother slaying such a sad creature?” he went on. “Yet men willingly consort with such. Can you explain it?”
“The men are drunk as well.”
“I am devoutly grateful that the occasional fine port does not bring me to such a condition.”
I nodded to some tattered-looking men linking arms with lamp-poles along the lane. “Most of these men are brute laborers. Their work is low and vile and distasteful, and so are their scant and guilty pleasures, but I tell you, Holmes, the same game is played in more attractive guise in the West End nightly.”
“Ah. So I understand. Or know for a fact. It is the same game you say, Watson. Then a man from a pristine playing surface might wish to…try his skill in a more…dangerous neighborhood.”
“True, Holmes. The confirmed hedonist seeks sensation at its rawest. A demented aristocrat may wish to wallow in the city’s worst sinkhole.”
“There. That innocuously run-down building is an opium den of my…knowledge. I guarantee that all within are dead to the world, Watson. The life that goes on in these streets is another matter. When death strikes here it is usually not worth noting. Where does the Ripper begin and end? I begin to think he is eternal. Not a man, but a…mania.”
“How can you find and accuse a mania, Holmes?”
“I don’t know. I suspect it hasn’t been done before.” He paused under another lamp to light his pipe, nodding at the bobby who strolled past.
“You’ve been here before,” I accused.
“Frequently. In many guises, including my own.”
“Your own personage is not a disguise, Holmes.”
“Is it not? One night I stood perhaps ten feet from the Ripper.”
“You saw him?
”
“I glimpsed his shadow. And chased another shadow, believing it more likely.” He inhaled so deeply on the clay pipe the bowl glowed as cherry-red as fresh-spilt blood. “I went the wrong way. I pursued a witness, not a perpetrator. I left the Ripper behind to do his bloody work.”
“You, Holmes?”
“I, Watson. The man I observed was berating a woman. He knocked her down but from my recent observations of the environs, knocking down women is more the commonplace than the exception. I took it for the usual street scene. By the time I returned, she was warm but no more. It was all I could do to remove myself from the vicinity without being hailed as the Ripper myself.”
“Good God, Holmes! You were that close?”
“I was that far, and for that I shall never forgive myself. If I ever do somehow stand before St. Peter and he is inclined to admit me to the pearly gates, I shall take myself off directly in the opposite direction, merely for the evil I did that one night with one wrong decision. I did not understand the customs of the country, Watson. I am a stranger in a strange land.”
“You are indeed, when you quote Holy Writ.”
“How is it holy?”
“‘A stranger in a strange land.’ It is what Ruth became for her mother-in-law Naomi’s sake.”
“These are persons I should know?”
“Well, yes. If one were well-read.”
“I am perfectly well-read, Watson, merely not in those tiresome tomes that pass for essential in our day. In fact, I am so well-read that I now number Krafft-Ebing among my acquaintance.” It was as close as Holmes ever came to a jocularity. He eyed me, head tilted like a robin expecting some unwise worm to rise to the surface. “Do you think that this author would have useful insight on this place?”
“Vaguely. Promotes a bunch of lurid poppycock, if you ask me.”
“How well you put it, Watson. Then you do not think his lurid poppycock is even worth the denouncing.”
“We can discuss it, Holmes, once we are out of this dreadful place. I can certainly see how the Ripper was able to slink among these ill-lit byways and pounce upon his victims, then disappear, if that is what you brought me here to see.”
“I brought you here to see what I could not see.”
“There is nothing you cannot see.”
“Exactly. I would be obliged if you would wander ’mongst the lost and the damned for a while longer. We can have a warming toddy back in Baker Street and compare notes.”
“It will take more than a toddy to erase this stink from our nostrils.”
“At least we can leave the vicinity and its foulnesses far behind. That is more than its residents can achieve. Ah.” He stopped to stare at an unprepossessing brick building of four stories before us. “The International Working Men’s Educational Club. It was near here that I so deserted sense and chased the wrong quarry. Now we are getting somewhere.”
“Holmes, I am sure that any man would have made the same mistake.”
“Ah, but I am not any man. Stand with me here by the road and let us dissect that abominable evening. It was nearly one of the clock. The club’s front door, which you see there, was locked, but that gateway at the side was open, and led through a small yard to a rear entrance, so residents could come and go as they needed.”
“Is this a legitimate club, Holmes?”
I saw a sickle-moon of smile in the dim lamplight. “It is not secretly a house of ill repute, Watson, unless you count Socialism as a social ill and they would say they are only here to reform social ills. Yes, it is what is said, and I have the rabbi’s word on that, for what little credit he gives the young revolutionaries that assemble here, as you heard from his own lips.”
“A wise man.”
“That is what the title means, I believe, although arcane religious matters of any stripe are far beyond my ken. At any rate, I had taken a post opposite the club, in disguise of course.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because a number of the early suspects were Jews. This is a central point where men of that race come and go. And after two murders that had particularly captured the public imagination, not to mention the usual string of women murdered in the district months and years before, I noted that the murders of Mary Ann Nicholls and Annie Chapman had occurred in a certain progression of dates. It seemed some pattern underlay the attacks.”
“You were following a wild guess, admit it, Holmes!”
“I was following my own logic.” He drew deeply on his pipe before speaking again. “I will admit that there are some few areas in which I am personally deficient and that they probably intersected here, to my chagrin and to the death of that woman, Elizabeth Stride. Chagrin, I am convinced, falls far lower on St. Peter’s list of failings than unnecessary death. It is lucky that I do not believe in such postmortem fairy tales.”
I did not know what to say. I had seen Holmes perplexed, Holmes afire with the hunt, Holmes triumphant. I had never seen Holmes humble, and I suspected that this was as close as I would ever come in my lifetime.
He gazed at the street opposite. “No woman killed in Whitechapel, Watson, during or before or after the Ripper’s reign, was seen with so many men of varying appearance as Elizabeth Stride, this forty-four-year-old unfortunate who was missing two front teeth. I saw her with one myself, though I don’t believe I can afford to discount the earlier men who crossed her path, some quite intimately, according to witnesses. From the testimony, there was a cordiality to the encounters that quite surprises me. Perhaps you can explain.”
“It is a game, Holmes. The woman pretends interest in the man, she flatters and flirts. What she wants is the coins that will ease her life for a few hours, whether spent on beer or a bed indoors at a doss house. Usually she is so drunk she scarce knows what she is doing. So is he.”
“A fine advertisement for such transactions, Watson. I have seen more personal interchanges in an opium den.”
“Both parties in such exchanges are benighted, miserable souls, Holmes. All the world knows that. Still, the great cities of that world support ten thousands of prostitutes and many times more men to patronize them. It is a ritual as old as earth.”
“No doubt why those stars and moons and planets keep such a wide berth of our own globe. Take yourself back to that night of twenty-nine September last year, Watson. By sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 P.M. Elizabeth Stride had earned sixpence through some cleaning work. She planned further and more profitable expeditions, for she borrowed a clothes brush from Charles Preston, a barber, and left a piece of velvet with Catharine Lane, a charwoman, two friends she encountered at Flower and Dean Street.
“By 11:00 P.M., two laborers saw her lingering with a man outside the Bricklayer’s Arms pub in Settle Street as they entered. They were surprised that the couple were hugging and kissing in the open. The man was too respectably dressed for such behavior: smart black morning suit and coat, billycock hat, black mustache, about five-foot-five.”
I nodded, seeing the picture painted like a scene in a play.
“The workmen couldn’t resist taunting the woman. The man with her, they teased, resembled Leather Apron.”
“Leather Apron! Good God, Holmes, quite a chilling fellow. He was one of the earliest suspects in the Ripper murders.”
“One of the earliest and the least likely, save that he had all the earmarks of a suspect made to order for the press to convict in print, which they are even better at than Scotland Yard detectives are at letting the guilty go. Although, in this instance, I behaved remarkably like Scotland Yard’s finest,” he finished bitterly.
Holmes would indeed be chagrined with himself for committing the same blunders for which he so often berailed officialdom.
“This man did appear in the streets in a Leather Apron and when arrested was found to keep several nasty knives at home, was he not?” I asked.
“Indeed. He was a bootmaker, hence the apron and possibly the long knives at home. He bullied the ladies of the night, no d
oubt, and was Jewish. Worst of all, his name was Jack. Jack Pizer. He was the sort of neighborhood bogeyman that the police and press could wish for, a ‘crazy Jew’ to throw to the mob and the police courts, with a nickname created to terrify women and children in their beds,” Holmes finished almost contemptuously.
“I can’t deny that I would seize upon such a name for a story of mine.”
“Of yours, or of mine?” Holmes asked acidly.
“Of…yours, of course. All stories of mine are…yours.”
“Hmmm. Not as flattering as you might think, Watson. I distinctly forbid you to concoct any ‘story’ of this case. It is too awful to perpetuate in all its gory glory. At any rate, too much time has already been wasted on Leather Apron. But back to twenty-nine September, 1888. Sometime before midnight, Matthew Packer sold fruit to a man and a woman from his front room at forty-four Berner Street.”
“Next-door to the murder site we now stand near!”
“Indeed so, Watson. No one is more quickly attuned to the nuances of street addresses than a doctor who is called out frequently in the night. In this instance I detect a clear superiority to the mere olfactory skills of Toby the bloodhound.”
I knew that if I could view Holmes by a paraffin lamp I would see the twinkle in his eye as he so gently paid me back for my peevish complaint of a while previous in Baker Street.
“Poor old Packer!” he went on. “His testimony wavered like his aged hand. Although he identified the woman as Long Liz and described a man of thirty to five-and-thirty years as her companion, a dark-favored man of medium height, it remains a questionable sighting.”
Holmes drew deeply on the pipe, expelling enough smoke for a miniature steam engine before he continued. He turned and looked down the street.
“The next witness is the only one to have heard a soon-to-be-dead woman speak. He was William Marshall, another laborer, and he was standing outside of his lodgings at sixty-four Berner Street when he noticed a couple standing outside next door. He remarked that neither appeared to be drunk but that the couple kissed. This appears to have been common behavior in the neighborhood. He reports that the man—middle-aged, stout, and clean-shaven, about five-foot-six—commented “You would say anything except your prayers,” then walked the woman down the street toward Dutfield’s yard.” Holmes nodded to the gate across the way from us.
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