And right at the top of the crevice he found something. It was a flake of paint – in fact it was a couple of scrapes of paint and some very faint scratches in the rock – where the crevice narrowed and its sides came together. It looked as if something, something metallic and painted a dark colour, had been jammed into the gap. He couldn’t be certain, obviously, but an unpleasantly logical scenario was beginning to assemble itself in his brain.
If the cloth had been used to wrap up the menorah, and if it had been standing in that crevice, then a man investigating the chamber would probably have seen it. He would obviously have been carrying a lamp of some sort, and might very probably have forced that lamp into the gap so that it would be held in place to provide a steady light while he used both hands to examine what he’d found. It was a scenario that contained a large number of imponderables, but taken as a whole it all made a horribly logical kind of sense.
Pedachenko had trained as a surgeon, and had then worked as an investigator for the Okhrana. Both career choices meant that he was well used to making logical deductions based upon whatever evidence was offered to him.
He took a couple of paces away from the opening and looked around the room again, seeking any further clues and trying as far as he could to work out the probable sequence of events which must have occurred in the chamber, assuming that his initial deduction was correct. The menorah, he knew from what Chenkovsky had told him two years earlier, had been made of gold. That would mean it was heavy, obviously, and so if whoever had entered the chamber had found it standing in the crevice, and had then lifted it out, he would probably have put it down fairly quickly.
Pedachenko lowered his oil lamp to examine the floor close to the opening in the rock. And there he saw what he had hoped not to find. Right in front of him was a square indentation in the soil which formed the floor of the chamber, a place where some heavy object had clearly been put down. It wasn’t difficult to work out what that object had most likely been.
And there was confirmation, of a sort, around that spot. He could see a number of footprints, but these weren’t the imprints of the flat-bottomed sandals which he’d noticed at other locations in the tunnels. These shoes seemed to have separate heels and a faint pattern on the sole. In fact, those prints didn’t look significantly different to those that his own shoes had made as he worked his way along the tunnels.
The conclusion was as obvious as it was unwelcome. Pedachenko cursed volubly in Russian for over a minute, then fell silent. He’d been beaten to the prize. The menorah had obviously been wrapped in that cloth, and whoever had found it had jammed his lamp into the narrowest part of the crevice while he removed the relic. It must have happened relatively recently: the match he’d found and the footprints he’d just discovered were proof enough of that.
For a few moments, the Russian debated whether he should check the rest of the underground complex, but then he shook his head. In his heart he knew that that would be a complete waste of time. There was nothing else he could do in the tunnels, because he was as certain as he could be that the menorah was long gone.
But that didn’t mean that his quest had come to an end. He knew that the evidence he had discovered for the location of the relic, and for its subsequent removal, was largely circumstantial, but in his own mind he was as certain as he could be that it had been hidden in the tunnels under the Temple Mount, and that somebody had found his way into the ancient labyrinth, discovered the menorah, and then removed it.
But because there had been no statement – at least as far as he knew – in any country that the most sacred relic of the Jewish religion had been found, he was confident that the person who’d found it hadn’t made his discovery public. And that implied that the finder had probably secreted the object away somewhere, either to organize the private sale of the relic or to arrange to have it melted down as gold bullion.
So the hunt wasn’t over. What Pedachenko needed to do now was to find out the identity of the man who had beaten him to the prize, and then recover the menorah from him. Whatever it took to do that, the Russian was confident he could manage it, one way or another.
He would start his search the very next day, and discover the identity of anybody who was known to have carried out excavations of any sort in the vicinity of the Temple Mount. He was aware that digging in the area had been forbidden for some time, but Pedachenko already knew that an Englishman had been given permission to carry out some limited excavations near the site a few years ago, long before he himself had arrived in Jerusalem. He also knew that the man had been forbidden to dig on or under the Temple Mount, but that meant nothing. The English were a mongrel nation, lacking the purity and nobility of the Russians, and known to be devious and deceitful, and if the man had wanted to excavate under the Mount, Pedachenko was sure that he would have found a way to do so.
That man was probably the most likely culprit, but before he did anything else Pedachenko would make absolutely sure that his conclusion was correct, and check that nobody else had been near the site.
And then, Pedachenko promised himself, he would track down both the man and the menorah. He would take away the relic, which he believed was rightfully his, purely on the basis of the work and expense he’d already incurred in trying to trace it, and then he would arrange another accident. Another fatal accident, just to ensure that nobody would ever know what had happened or where the menorah had been found.
As he emerged into the crypt of the church, and despite what he’d discovered, Pedachenko felt strangely satisfied. He’d been cheated in this first move of the game, but now his course of action was obvious.
He almost relished the expectation of the hunt and the kill which were to come.
Part Two
London
Thursday, 2 August 1888
London
That night, he’d had the nightmare again.
He was back in the tunnel system under the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, struggling along with the menorah, now wrapped in sacking, clutched in both hands as he headed for the vertical shaft that would take him back to the surface. But there were noises behind him, noises that were getting steadily closer. A scrabbling sound, like running feet, and a whispering and hissing as of many voices, growing louder. And then there were the clutching hands, the hands of Jews, Warren was sure, grabbing at his clothing while the horde of shapeless figures behind him muttered a simple and endlessly repeated six-word mantra: ‘It is ours. Give it back.’
And then he was climbing the ladder, climbing up the shaft and away from the tunnel complex, but still he could feel the hands on his ankles and wrists, trying to pull him down, to pull him back into the darkness of the underground labyrinth. And the voices were louder, almost a shout. Why could nobody else hear them but him? And just as the grip of the bony skeletal fingers around his limbs finally stopped him moving upwards, and began to drag him slowly down, down into the depths and into the darkness from which he knew he would never be able to emerge again, he woke up with a yell of horror.
For a few seconds, he had no idea where he was, only an overwhelming sense of relief that he wasn’t still in Jerusalem. The bedsheets were tangled around his limbs, and his arms and chest were clammy with sweat. He looked across the room at the connecting door, which gave access to his wife Fanny’s bedroom, wondering if she had heard him call out, but there was no sound anywhere in the house.
Outside the window the sky was lightening to reveal what looked like the start of another fairly dull day in a fairly dull summer in London. According to his pocket watch on the stand beside his bed, it was just before 5.30 in the morning, and he knew that he would get no more sleep that night.
He glanced across to the chair which stood close to the bed, and upon which he placed a number of reports which he had been studying until late the previous evening. As he was now wide awake, Charles Warren decided that he might as well try and get some work done, because he had quite enough real problems to cope with, without
dwelling on nightmares that were triggered by what had happened over a decade and a half earlier in Jerusalem.
He picked up the first report from the pile, opened it and began reading the terse official language. But even as his eyes scanned the typewritten notes, his memory took him back to the dark tunnels under the Temple Mount as he relived the experience once again.
There had, of course, being no clutching hands or whispering voices – they were merely a product of his imagination – and he had encountered no difficulty, apart from the sheer weight of the object, in hiding the menorah, now a shapeless bundle wrapped in the sacks he’d taken down the shaft, in the bottom of the largest of his personal trunks. Then he’d replaced his clothes and other belongings on top of it to conceal it from view.
He had known at the time that he was taking a tremendous risk in not declaring the object, but he’d also felt that admitting what he’d done and revealing what he’d found would be even more dangerous. Because Jerusalem was under the control of the Ottoman Turks, who of course followed Islam and barely even tolerated the Jewish religion, he had dared not announce his find to the pasha, the local ruler, because he feared that the man would most probably simply seize the relic for himself, and might even just melt it down for its gold content.
He had also been concerned for his own safety and that of his men, because they would clearly have been aware of the significance of the find, and would be inconvenient witnesses to whatever the pasha decided to do. The man might even have come to the conclusion that no witnesses at all would be the ideal solution, and have arranged for Warren and his men to be executed.
The only problem he then had to solve was how to get himself and his team, and of course the menorah, out of Jerusalem. But that conundrum was unexpectedly solved a few days later, when a second and completely unanticipated firman arrived from Constantinople, this one forbidding all further excavation. They obviously had no option but to pack their belongings and leave.
After his return to Britain, Warren had locked the menorah away in the large safe at his London home while he decided what to do with it. And in some ways that had proved to be a far bigger problem than finding the relic in the first place, because he really had no idea of the best course of action. He couldn’t admit that he’d found the object and carried it back to Britain, because by any definition that would be regarded as stealing. He had too much respect for the relic and what it had meant in the past to the Jewish nation to even consider having it melted down for its bullion value alone. It was simply too important for that. And while he tried to make up his mind, the object sat behind the heavy steel door of his safe, having exchanged one dark and secure hiding place for another.
And then other factors had come into play, all of which had conspired to prevent him doing anything with the menorah, even if he had been able to come to a decision about it.
For several years after his return, he had been appointed to various domestic posts because his health didn’t permit him to travel abroad: he had suffered considerably because of the cramped and insalubrious conditions he had encountered underground and, even if the prohibition on further excavations hadn’t been sent, he would probably have had to leave the Jerusalem dig anyway, at least for a time.
And then, when he was finally fully recovered, he was immediately sent out to Africa. Then his career had blossomed, but he hadn’t returned home for four years, until 1880, to become the Chief Instructor in Surveying at the School of Military Engineering, a post he held for a further four years. A year after that, he’d stood for Parliament, but hadn’t been elected.
In 1886 he had been ordered to go back to the Middle East, when he was appointed commander at Suakin in the Sudan. But instead of the two-year tour of duty on the shore of the Red Sea he had been anticipating, within a matter of weeks after his arrival he was unexpectedly recalled to London.
A man named Sir Edmund Henderson had just resigned from his job as the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis – the Metropolitan Police – and Warren had been chosen as his replacement. Nobody, least of all Warren himself, seemed to have any idea exactly why he had been selected, as he had no experience of police work and was by training a surveyor. His single experience of criminal investigation had been a brief detachment to Sinai four years earlier, in 1882, to try to discover the fate of the missing members of an archaeological expedition led by a Professor Palmer. Warren had been successful – he found that the men had been robbed and then murdered, and he even managed to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice – but that had been a military-style investigation, not a civilian police operation at all.
But Warren had no choice. His masters had decided his fate, and he had to obey.
And since then, he’d found himself, if not out of his depth, certainly encountering far more difficulties and problems than he could ever have anticipated.
And his core difficulty could be summed up in one single word: London.
The capital was a city of contrasts and a city in turmoil. The disparity between the small number of incredibly wealthy people and the grinding poverty of the masses was simply enormous. In the West End, vast armies of servants lived in huge houses, virtual palaces in many cases, catering to the needs and whims of both the nobility and members of the newly evolved merchant class – old and new money living side by side. But in the East End, entire families were forced to live in single unheated and largely unfurnished rooms in buildings which had no sanitation whatsoever, and frequently not even the luxury of one cold-water tap.
The city’s history was dark, dank and depressing. Bubonic plague had ravaged London in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing about two thirds of the inhabitants and, throughout the mediaeval period, the population never reached the level it had achieved when the Romans had been occupying Britain. The plague made four return visits in the seventeenth century, killing over 100,000 people, and in 1666 the Great Fire of London destroyed a huge area of the city. At this time, the Thames was little more than an open sewer, the streets were strewn with offal, excrement and rubbish, and the whole city teamed with feral dogs, cats, rats, mice, fleas and other pests. The stench was simply dreadful.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, London’s population had risen to about 300,000, roughly a tenth that of the country as a whole, which made it the largest city in Europe at the time. One reason for the growth was the expansion of the London docks and the growing importance of the city as a centre for maritime trade. Something like half of the ships serving Britain loaded or unloaded their cargoes in London. And allied with the development of the docks were the warehouses, factories and manufacturing facilities, housing, entertainment and shops that were directly or indirectly associated with this expansion.
And all these legitimate businesses were mirrored by what might be termed the darker side of the city: the slums, drinking dens and rampant prostitution which characterized the East End of London.
As trade increased so, inevitably, did crime. Sophisticated criminal gangs stole such huge amounts of cargo that in some cases they operated their own warehouse facilities simply to handle the vast quantity of goods they had obtained. The police were outnumbered and frequently outsmarted, and relied heavily on informers and turncoats as they vainly battled to combat the thieves. To make matters worse, the police force was largely corrupt, officers often working hand in glove with the criminals they were supposed to be apprehending, and in some cases actually participating in, or at the very least encouraging, the actions of the thieves.
The situation for the poor had deteriorated markedly with the series of Enclosure Acts which had handed over large tracts of land to wealthy landowners and prevented the peasantry from making use of areas which had historically been in common usage. Despite the fact that people were starving to death every day, England’s farmers were at this time producing more than enough grain to feed everybody in the country, but instead of being distributed equably, a substantial proportion of t
he crop was turned into gin.
For the working – and far too often the starving – classes, gin became a part of their staple diet, and alcoholism a way of life. By the middle of the eighteenth century, figures suggest that there was one gin house in London for every seventy people, and in some parts of the city as many as a quarter of the houses sold the liquor. The annual consumption of the spirit in London exceeded seven million gallons, and some estimates suggest that as many as one in eight citizens died as a direct result of drinking alcohol. The death rate increased to about double that of the birth rate, and the average lifespan of a male dropped to less than thirty years.
Diseases, which included measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, tubercular meningitis, pleurisy, diphtheria, dysentery and whooping cough were endemic in London, and especially in the East End, and contributed to the high mortality rate. About one in every four children died before they were one year old.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the population of the city had surged to over four million, and crime was rife. The streets teemed with thieves, muggers, pimps, prostitutes and even pirates, and the East End had degenerated even further into a vast and squalid slum comprising an unholy mix of doss houses, churches, brothels, shops, slaughterhouses, pubs and poor houses.
The last resort for many was the ‘spike’ or workhouse. With nowhere else to go, a destitute man or woman could register either long term or just for a few nights in the ‘casual ward’. But even getting inside was far from easy, as there were usually long queues for admittance, and the rules and routine were harsh. Any supplies of alcohol and tobacco were removed from the inmates, and families were split up, children being taken away from their parents and housed separately. Discipline was rigid, the food virtually inedible and the conditions insanitary in the extreme: in those workhouses equipped with the luxury of a bath, people were expected to bathe in the same tepid water used by as many as a dozen others before them. The regime was more like a prison than anything else, inmates being forced to perform the kind of tasks that incarcerated men and women would have regarded as hard labour, including breaking rocks and picking oakum – unravelling old ropes. The workhouse routine also prevented the inmates from finding work by refusing to allow them to leave until late in the morning, by which time all the available casual-labouring jobs would have been taken.
The Ripper Secret Page 8