by Lyndsay Faye
“How soon can you be in a cab?”
“Instantly. What is the matter?”
“George Lusk requests our aid in the most urgent language. Make haste, my dear fellow, for he is not a man to trifle with our time!”
When we arrived at Tollet Street, Holmes was out of the cab in a moment, bounding up the stairs and leaning against the bell. Immediately we were shown in to the same pleasant sitting room, occupied by the same palm fronds and self-important feline.
“I am very glad you both have come,” George Lusk declared, shaking our hands firmly. His lively brow was clouded with anxiety and the downward sweep of his moustache emphasized his unease. “The thing is a repulsive hoax, of course; I have no doubt it is merely a boon for those vultures of the popular press, but I thought it best to call you in.” He gestured to the rolltop desk.
Holmes reached it in an instant and lifted the slats. A strong smell, which I realized had faintly infused the room all along, permeated the atmosphere. I recognized it at once as spirits of wine, which was everywhere employed as a medical preservative and which I had often used myself during my years at university.
My friend seated himself at the desk, surveying a small box of plain cardboard, resting on the brown paper in which it had arrived. Mr. Lusk and I crowded round either shoulder to witness him open the receptacle. Inside sat a mound of glistening flesh.
“Well, Doctor?” said Holmes, glancing up at me. He pulled a pocketknife from his frock coat, opened it, and passed it to me along with the sinister box. I probed the object carefully.
“It is a portion of a kidney.”
“Nearly half, I would say from the angle of the cut and the arc of this side. Human?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Gender? Age?”
“I could not tell you. If it is half, as you say, then the kidney is adult, but beyond that, further identification is impossible.”
“It does not appear to be injected with the formalin* used for dissection organs. Tissue preserved only in spirits of wine would inevitably deteriorate without a fixative and grow quickly useless in the classroom, so we can rule out a prank by an undergraduate. However, the ethyl alcohol it has been resting in is easily obtained.”
“This letter accompanied the organ,” Mr. Lusk indicated.
My friend first inspected the container itself, followed by the paper wrapping, before reaching for the document which explained, in the most vile terms and debased calligraphy I had ever laid eyes on, the contents of that horrid box.
From hell
Mr Lusk
Sor
I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer.
Signed Catch me when
You can
Mishter Lusk
“Black ink, cheapest foolscap, no finger marks or other traces,” Holmes said softly. “‘From hell,’ indeed! What sort of frenzied imagination could be capable of constructing such trash?”
“It is a hoax, surely,” Mr. Lusk insisted. “Everyone knows Catherine Eddowes’s kidney was taken, after all, Mr. Holmes. It is the organ of a dog. Oh, I do beg your pardon, Dr. Watson—if human, as you say, perhaps it is a prank enacted by a roguish medical examiner.”
“It is possible,” said Holmes. “I do not think it likely. Look at this script: I detect key similarities to other samples from our quarry, but what a state he was in to pen this dark epistle! I have made a special study of handwriting, or graphology,* as it is now called by the French, but I have never seen anything so debauched as this specimen.”
“The script alone leads you to think this her kidney?”
“This scrap of flesh came from no school or university, and neither did it come from the nearby London Hospital.”
“How can you be sure?”
“When necessary, they preserve organic materials in glycerine.”
“Well, then, but it need not have come from the East-end. Surely in the West-end, many establishments—”
“The postmark, if one regards it with a lens, reveals the barest smudge of a ‘London E.’ It originated in Whitechapel.”
“Still, any mortuary could have supplied the thing.”
“Whitechapel possesses no mortuary!” Holmes snapped, his patience failing him. “It possesses a shed.”
Mr. Lusk’s features were suffused with complete astonishment. “But the crime rate in Whitechapel! The sickness, the disease…Only half the children ever grow up, Mr. Holmes. No district has greater need of a mortuary!”
“Nevertheless.”
“God in heaven, if the world knew the troubles of this district…” Mr. Lusk calmed himself through a visible effort of will and regarded us with a touching sadness.
“Watson, we have work ahead of us,” the detective declared shortly. “Mr. Lusk, may I entrust to you the task of reporting this matter to the Yard?”
“Of course, Mr. Holmes. Oh, and please do give my regards to Miss Monk!” Mr. Lusk exclaimed as we turned to leave. “I fear she may have been tormented to some degree by my offspring, but I trust she came to no lasting harm.”
Holmes was already halfway down the street before I reached him, the length of his stride more than making up for any residual weakness of constitution. Knowing him as I did, I had not expected him to proffer a single word, but to my surprise, speech fairly exploded from his gaunt frame.
“I will not be toyed with in this manner! As if we’d not already suffered intolerable lows, the sending of a preserved organ through the London Royal Mail quite strikes the final quivering nail into the coffin of this investigation.”
“My dear fellow, whatever can you mean?”
“Here we are furnished with clue after clue, missive after blood-soaked missive, and the villain has no further revealed his identity than he did when he plunged a knife in my chest,” he spat out in disgust. “Apart, of course, from its being a six-inch double-bladed dissection knife.”
“Holmes,” I protested, alarmed, “you have done all that could be expected of—”
“Of Gregson, or of Lestrade, or any of the other farcical simpletons who joined the Yard because they weren’t strong enough for hard labour or rich enough to buy a decent army commission.”
Shocked at his vehemence, I could only manage, “Surely we have made progress.”
“We are surrounded by quicksand! No footmarks, no signal traits, no traceable characteristics, merely the assurance he is enjoying his purloined organs and my cigarettes!”
“Holmes, where are we going?”
“To settle a debt,” he snarled, and not one word more did he say for the twenty minutes it took us to walk from Mile End to the throbbing artery of Whitechapel Road and then down a series of streets to a green door in a begrimed brick wall. Holmes rapped brusquely and then fell to tapping the head of his stick against his high forehead.
“Who resides here, Holmes?”
“Stephen Dunlevy.”
“Does he indeed? You have been here before?”
His answering glare was so exquisitely pained that I resolved to postpone further queries for better days.
A slatternly creature of advancing years in a meticulously preened bonnet opened the door and regarded us with the primness of the long-ruined. “How may I help you gentlemen?”
“We are here to see your lodger, Mr. Stephen Dunlevy.”
“And who are you, sir?”
“We are friends.”
“Now, this is a private establishment, gents. I can’t just allow any man from the street to harass my lodgers, if you understand me, sir.”
“Perfectly. In that case, we are here to bring charges against you for brothel keeping under Section Thirteen of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. That is, of course, unless you manage to remember we are friends of Mr. Dunlevy.”
“Why, of course!” she exclaimed. “The light must have dazzled my eyes. T
his way, if you please.”
We ascended a staircase draped in layers of cobweb and silt and crossed the hallway to an unmarked door. The landlady knocked.
“Come along, now, for there’s men to see you. Friends of yours, or so I’m told.” She favoured us with a sparingly toothed smile before descending out of sight beyond the staircase.
Without waiting for a response, Holmes gripped the knob and plunged inside and had seated himself in a nearby chair before our startled host, standing next to his open door, could venture to greet us.
“Though slowed by the thankless task of ascertaining your identity, Mr. Dunlevy, I have traced Johnny Blackstone back to his birthplace, his parents’ country farm, his primary school, his initial regiment, his transfer, his Egyptian service, and his disappearance. What I want to know is where he is. His regiment, his parents, and his dear sister are quite as eager to find him as I am. You are about to tell me every detail of your first encounter with Blackstone, omitting no microscopic facet no matter how trivial. I invite you, in fact, to glory in the trivial.” Holmes lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. “This agency runs on minutiae, Mr. Dunlevy, and you must furnish me with fuel.”
So began an interrogation which lasted the better part of four hours; however, it seemed to me (and, I have no doubt, to Stephen Dunlevy) to have gone on for days. Over and over again Holmes demanded he recount his story. Dunlevy somehow managed to retain his good humour, but I watched him grow increasingly angry at himself that his indiscretions that night had so far impaired his observation.
I was leaning against the door smoking, Dunlevy sunk in an armchair with his chin in his hand, and Holmes draped across another chair with his feet propped on the low mantelpiece, when my friend resumed a line of questioning I thought had been exhausted long before.
“From the time Blackstone met Martha Tabram to the time you left the Two Brewers, how much of their conversation were you able to catch?”
“Only what I have told you, Mr. Holmes. Everyone was shouting and no one taking heed of a word.”
“It is not good enough! Cast your mind back. You really must try, Mr. Dunlevy.”
Dunlevy screwed his eyes shut in concentration, rubbing a weary hand along the bridge of his nose. “Blackstone complimented her bonnet. He called it very becoming. He insisted on paying for drinks for her, and she knew they would be fast friends. They fell to tormenting one of the other fellows—an edgy private who’d had his eye on a girl for an hour and still hadn’t spoken to her.”
“And then?”
“He talked of the Egyptian campaign.”
“The words he used?”
“I cannot recall exactly. He used exotic language, vivid pictures…There was a tale about three cobras that seemed to amuse her very much. I could barely manage to—”
Holmes sat up in his chair with an expression of burning interest. “Three cobras, you say?”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
“You are sure of the number?”
“I would be prepared to swear it was three. Remarkable he should have encountered so many at once, but I confess I know nothing of Egyptian terrain.”
Holmes leapt to his feet and steepled his fingers before his lips, his countenance frozen but his entire posture vibrating with barely contained energy. “Mr. Dunlevy, the question I am about to pose is of paramount importance. Describe to me, as precisely as possible, Blackstone’s eyes.”
“They were blue, very pale in colour,” Dunlevy faltered, attempting to rearrange his features so that they did not imply my friend was out of his senses.
“Did he seem troubled at all by the light?”
“There was little enough light in the lairs we visited. One bright lamp in the White Swan, I believe. I remember he sat with his back to it, but they never lost their colour. Even in the darkest of the gin shops you could see his pale eyes shining out at you.”
Holmes let out an exclamation of unparalleled delight. Rushing forward, he began to wring Dunlevy’s hand. “I knew you could not have been thrown in our path merely to torment us!” He retrieved his hat and stick and made a theatrical bow. “Dr. Watson, our presence is required elsewhere. Good day to you, Mr. Dunlevy!”
I raced after my friend and caught him up at the corner.
“Nihil obstat.* It is a great stroke of luck. Stephen Dunlevy has just told us everything we need.”
“I am heartily glad of it.”
Holmes laughed. “I’ll own I was in a bit of a fit this morning, but surely you’ll overlook it if I tell you where we shall find word of Johnny Blackstone.”
“I confess that I cannot imagine any link between a man’s eyesight and his Egyptian exploits.”
“You, like Dunlevy, think the reference to three cobras a relic of foreign wars, then?”
“What else could it possibly mean?”
“As a medical man, the constriction of his pupils even during levels of very low illumination ought to suggest something to you.”
“On the contrary—cobra venom is a neurotoxin working on the muscles of the diaphragm and could have nothing to do with photosensitivity, or indeed any ocular symptom.”
“As usual, my dear fellow, you are both correct and misled.” He whistled stridently for a fortuitous hansom which had just rolled into view. “It will all be clear to you in a few minutes’ time, when I have introduced you to the Three Cobras, possibly the least savoury opium den in the whole of Limehouse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A Narrow Escape
It was not a long journey down Commercial Road from Whitechapel to the tiny dockside realm of Limehouse, but the latter’s total dependence upon all things nautical made it a vastly different topography. Here the carmen were replaced by sailors, the market porters became dockside labourers, and the races as we approached the river grew ever more diverse. As the sun began to set over the lumbering Thames, I glimpsed from the window Welsh dockworkers, African stevedores, and Indian porters, all drifting in the general direction of hearth and home with a stop at the pub and two or three glasses of gin to sustain them on their way.
We turned abruptly onto a street, and all around us Chinese men and women, dressed immaculately in the British style, ducked in and out of shops marked only with the delicate slashes which served as writing in their native land. One young fellow, his pigtail tucked under a neat cloth cap and his fingerless gloves affording slight protection in the chill wind, pushed a child about in a tea leaf box which had been fitted with two front wheels, a back prop, and sanded handles.
Holmes rapped the ceiling of the cab with his stick, and the driver halted before a storefront identifying itself only by a crude picture of a steaming bowl. My friend leapt down with agile enthusiasm, tilting his head to our left toward the dampest, most soot-encrusted archway I’d ever laid eyes on. The businesses on either side, whose commerce I could not even hazard a guess at, boasted broken windowpanes patched with greasy brown paper.
“It’s just this way. Thank you, driver. And now, Watson, we would do best to keep our wits about us.”
Under the arch, we came upon a flight of mossy stone steps which led steeply down, under wooden slats and walls of grim brick, to a grotesque courtyard some three stories below the street at the level of the river. Seven houses sat in a semicircle, all constructed of rotting grey timber. My friend approached the sagging doorframe belonging to one of these and rapped three times.
When the door opened, a stoop-shouldered Chinese man with tufted silver brows and a peculiarly detached expression made a polite bow.
“I wonder, is this the establishment known as the Three Cobras?” Holmes ventured deferentially.
The proprietor, or so I assumed him to be, nodded his head. “There are several berths if you wish to smoke, sirs,” he said in near-perfect English.
“What a stroke of luck,” Holmes smiled.
“I am Mr. Li. Please step this way.”
The outer door opened into a hallway, which after a flight of three s
teep steps became a narrow passage with beds built into the walls like berths on a ship, six pallets arranged in a rectangular formation on each side of the corridor. One old woman, with eyes set deep as wells and a long braid of lead-grey hair, looked to have just enough life in her to continue smoking the vile substance.
“Holmes, how on earth did you come to know of this pit?” I murmured.
“I make it my business to acquaint myself with a great many particulars,” he whispered.
Mr. Li waved us onward, for the corridor ballooned at its far end into a larger common room with a bed pushed against the wall and grass mats lining the floors. Gauzy hanging strips of tattered cloth, which had no doubt once contributed to an air of mysticism, now hung slick with smoke like the mud-soaked sails of a shipwrecked vessel. I could see other Englishmen in this chamber—two soldiers, lounging with elongated pipes dangling from their limp fingers, and a slack-jawed naval officer, whose hand traced lazy patterns in the thick air above him.
Mr. Li waved us over to a pair of grass pallets cloaked by the decrepit drapery. Holmes indicated we had time only for a four-penny smoke, and Mr. Li retreated to the stove, where a great mound of shredded opium simmered in a sieve set over a pot of shallow water.
“My dear Holmes, assure me that we have no intention of actually smoking this dross,” I mouthed as softly as I could.
“Never fear, Watson,” he returned equally quietly but with a mischievous grin. “You know my taste in self-poisoning to run quite in another direction.”
When Mr. Li had toasted two tiny portions of resinlike amber material and loaded it into pipes, he handed them to us and vanished. Holmes, to my dismay, placed the pipe between his teeth, but I soon saw he merely sought to free his hands and unfasten his watch chain. A gold sovereign dangled from the end of it, a relic of an earlier adventure,* and in a trice he had scooped the smouldering lump out of his pipe, dropped it to the floor, returned the stem to his mouth, and held a hand out for my own. This process he repeated with my pipe, and then he pulled out his pocket handkerchief and methodically restored the Queen’s golden visage to her former spotlessness. Finally, he picked up the cooled pieces with his handkerchief and deposited them in his pocket.