The Ripper Secret

by The Ripper Secret (retail) (epub)

  The man looked her up and down for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘I know just the place. Nice and quiet. Nobody’ll disturb us.’

  The man nodded again.

  ‘It’ll be sixpence,’ Tabram added, as the two of them walked side by side towards the entrance to George Yard. The man reached into his pocket, extracted some coins and handed them over.

  Tabram led the way through the covered passage and over towards the buildings on the east side of the alley where she and the soldier had briefly coupled some two hours before.

  There was enough illumination in the alley for them to see each other reasonably clearly, and as soon as she reached what she considered the best spot, Tabram turned to face her client and lifted her skirt and petticoat.

  ‘You like what you see, my dear?’ she asked, attempting a coquettish smile which didn’t quite come off.

  The man, who still hadn’t spoken a single word since they’d met, gestured towards the buildings they were standing beside.

  ‘Don’t you worry ‘bout them,’ Tabram murmured. ‘Nobody about there this time o’ night.’

  Then an idea struck her, and she again took his arm and led him inside, into the building itself. There was nowhere suitable on the ground floor, so they walked up the staircase together and stopped on the first-floor landing.

  ‘Even better in here, ain’t it?’ she said, looking at him.

  The man nodded once more, then gestured for her to turn around, to face away from him.

  That didn’t bother Tabram. Many of her clients preferred a rear entry position, and on the streets and alleys where she plied her trade, and where she never had the luxury of a bed, it was often more comfortable for both parties.

  She turned away from the man, then reached down to her ankles with both hands, intending to lift the skirt and petticoat again, but this time to expose her rear.

  But before her fingers even touched the material of her skirt, something completely unexpected happened. The man reached over her left shoulder and wrapped a pad of some kind of material over her face and then, too quickly for her to utter even a single cry of alarm, pressed it hard over her nose and mouth, holding it there with both hands.

  Behind Tabram, her assailant was operating with rapid and lethal efficiency, in precisely the way that he had planned. His weapon was simple enough. The cloth pad was simply a folded scarf, of the kind that many men wore around their necks, and which would arouse no suspicion if he was unfortunate enough to be stopped by a patrolling police officer. The other weapons which he carried were rather different, but he wouldn’t use either of those until the woman had succumbed to the suffocating effects of the scarf.

  Martha Tabram was struggling violently, fighting for her life, but because her attacker was behind her, her flailing arms never even touched him and the few kicks she landed with her heels on his shins had no effect. Even if she had been sober, it would have made no difference.

  And as her convulsions diminished, her body beginning to shut down because of the lack of oxygen in her bloodstream, the man behind her added the finishing touch, removing his right hand from the pad and placing it on her neck, feeling for the carotid artery and then jamming his fingers into exactly the right place to stop the blood flow to her brain.

  It was all over in less than two minutes, and there was barely a mark on Martha Tabram’s body to show what had killed her. But that was going to change in a matter of seconds.

  The man lowered the woman’s body to the floor of the landing and quickly felt for a pulse. Finding nothing, he then stood up and looked around, checking that he was still unobserved.

  Then he reached into his pocket and took out a heavy knife with a six-inch blade from a leather sheath. He moved to crouch beside the shoulders of the dead body, and drove the knife deep into her chest, ramming the heavy dagger through the victim’s breastbone, causing a gaping wound which Tabram luckily could not feel. Even if she had not been dead before, that blow would certainly have killed her, as the point of the blade plunged straight through her heart. That was just to make sure she was dead.

  Then he changed position, and his weapon, cleaning the blood off the blade using Tabram’s clothing, and then replacing it in the sheath, before taking out his much smaller knife, which had a blade only about half the size of his main weapon. The other knife was simply too big and heavy for what he had in mind. He needed the lighter weight and more delicate blade of the small knife.

  He bent down once again, roughly pulled the woman’s skirt and petticoat up to expose her stomach and groin, and plunged the short but freshly sharpened blade into her naked flesh. And not once, but time after time, the blade carving a glittering arc through the gloom of the landing, droplets of blood cascading off the knife as it performed its grisly task, slicing first into her abdomen and then her throat, further desecrating her corpse.

  Taking care to avoid getting any blood on his clothing, he delivered almost forty stab wounds, several of which, despite the fairly short blade, would have been instantly or ultimately fatal had Tabram still been breathing, before he finally cleaned her blood off his blade and replaced the knife in his pocket.

  As he did so, Pedachenko smiled. He wondered if the police or the doctor would realize he’d used two very different knives in the attack and, if they did, if they would assume that the killing had been done by two men. He also decided, at that moment, not to bother using the small knife for the next one. He could work more quickly and just as accurately with the heavy blade.

  Then he stood up, again checked all around him, but could neither see nor hear any signs of life. He glanced down at the body of the prostitute. It was lying in a shadowed area of the landing, and would probably not even be noticed if anyone walked past it. He nodded in satisfaction, straightened his jacket which had become slightly dishevelled during his attack, walked down the stairs and disappeared into the night.

  As he stepped outside the building, he muttered a single three-word sentence.

  ‘Now it begins.’

  Tuesday, 7 August 1888

  Whitechapel, London

  At about half past three that morning, a young cab driver named Alfred George Crow returned home from work. He lived in one of the George Yard Buildings and, as he climbed up to his lodging, he saw a figure lying on the first-floor landing, but the lighting was so dim that he thought she was simply another vagrant who had chosen that spot as her bed for the night.

  At about 2.45, John Saunders Reeves, who was employed as a day labourer at the London docks and who was leaving for work at that hour because of the distance he had to walk, also saw her, but because of the better illumination in the building as the skies outside brightened with the approach of dawn, he saw the blood around her body and realized immediately that she was dead, or at least very badly injured.

  Reeves rushed down the stairs and out of the building, looking for help. A few yards down the street, he saw the unmistakable shape of a patrolling police officer and ran over to him.

  ‘There’s a dead body,’ he shouted, as he approached. ‘In my building.’

  The patrolling constable, PC 226H Thomas Barrett, left his beat and followed Reeves back down George Yard and into the building.

  ‘She’s dead all right,’ Barrett said, crouching down and giving the body a cursory examination. ‘You stay here and make sure nobody touches her. I’ll fetch a doctor.’

  ‘You’d better be quick,’ Reeves retorted. ‘I’ve got to get to work, you know.’

  When Barrett reached Whitechapel High Street, he blew his whistle to summon assistance, and when another constable ran up to see what the trouble was, he sent this man off to find a doctor, while he relieved Reeves on the first-floor landing. Barrett knew as well as anyone that being late for work anywhere in London, but especially at the docks, was frequently sufficient cause for immediate dismissal, and he had no intention of causing Reeves any problems.

  Dr Timothy Robert Killeen, who had his surgery at 6
8 Brick Lane, arrived at the scene at about 5.30 to examine the body. The sight that greeted him was shocking for its casual brutality. The woman was lying on her back, her legs spread wide, and her skirt and petticoat had been pulled up to expose her corpse from about the waist down, as if she had been engaged in sexual intercourse when she’d been killed. Her stomach and groin were covered in blood from what were clearly dozens of separate stab wounds.

  ‘Looks to me like she was at it with a customer when he turned nasty,’ Barrett suggested, as Killeen bent over the body.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the doctor agreed, ‘though I don’t see any obvious signs of recent connection.’

  Killeen stood up and took a pace backwards, his eyes never leaving the body lying in front of him.

  ‘There’s nothing more I can do for her here,’ he went on. ‘We have to get the body moved to the mortuary as soon as we can.’

  Before Barrett could reply, heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs below them, and a few moments later another police officer arrived at the scene.

  ‘Not a good morning, doctor,’ the new arrival stated, ‘and certainly not for her,’ he added, with a nod towards the mutilated corpse. ‘I’m Inspector Reid, from H Division, Whitechapel. Any idea how long she’s been dead?’

  Killeen nodded a greeting.

  ‘Based on the body temperature, I’d suggest about three hours, but it’s difficult to be more accurate than that, because of the way she’s been left unclothed, and the stone floor will have cooled the body as well.’

  ‘So between about two and three in the morning, something like that?’ Edmund Reid suggested. He was the so-called ‘local inspector’, or head of the Criminal Investigation Department, of the Metropolitan Police’s H Division in Whitechapel, and a few minutes earlier he had been ordered to take charge of the investigation.

  ‘Probably about then, yes,’ Killeen agreed.

  ‘And she’s obviously been stabbed to death.’

  Killeen paused for a moment before replying.

  ‘I’m not entirely certain of that yet. She’s certainly been stabbed, there’s no doubt about that, but I can’t see any defensive wounds, no cuts on her hands or anything of that sort, which could suggest that she was choked or strangled first, or maybe even hit on the head, and that these wounds were inflicted after death. I won’t know for certain until I’ve performed the post-mortem examination. Have you arranged for a cart or an ambulance?’

  Inspector Reid nodded.

  ‘There’s one on its way,’ he replied. ‘So it looks like she might have been killed before she was stabbed? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, not unless we’re dealing with the work of a lunatic.’

  ‘Nor to me, Inspector, nor to me. And this is not what we’re used to here.’

  Oddly enough, despite the squalor, poverty and crime that were endemic in the Whitechapel area at this time, murder there was almost unknown. In the previous year, there had been eighty murders in London, but not one of them had occurred in Whitechapel. The mortality rate in the district was high, but the causes were enormously varied, including disease, starvation and accident, and assaults were by no means uncommon. But very rarely was a life ever taken there by violence.

  The sound of iron-shod hooves sounded in the silence of the street outside, and Reid sent Barrett down the stairs to find out who it was.

  The constable was back in a few seconds.

  ‘It’s a cart come to remove the body, sir,’ he reported.

  ‘Right,’ Reid said. ‘You start talking to the residents, Barrett. Somebody must have seen or heard something, in a building like this. Bring whatever information you find to me at the station.’

  As Barrett walked away, two men made their way up the staircase, carrying an old and battered lightweight wooden coffin between them, its scratched and battered exterior showing the unmistakable signs of repeated use.

  ‘There’s no official mortuary here in Whitechapel,’ Killeen said, ‘so where are you taking her body?’

  ‘I’ve already sent a constable to the workhouse in Old Montague Street. He’ll arrange for it to be put in the deadhouse there.’

  The deadhouse was a kind of makeshift mortuary attached to the workhouse, intended to accommodate anyone who died while they were resident at the establishment. It wasn’t an ideal location, but it was the best they could do.

  ‘I know where that is,’ Killeen replied, nodding. ‘I can do the post-mortem there.’

  The two men watched as the bloody corpse was lifted off the stone floor and lowered into the coffin.

  ‘If there’s nothing else, Inspector,’ Killeen said, ‘I’ll get back home for some breakfast. You’re welcome to attend the post-mortem if you want, but otherwise I’ll see you at the inquest.’

  ‘I think it’ll have to be the inquest, doctor, because I’ll need to organize a search of the building and talk to the residents. I have to catch this man, and quickly.’

  * * *

  ‘A murder?’ Charles Warren asked. ‘Of a woman? Where? And what were the exact circumstances?’

  It was the middle of the afternoon, and the commissioner had summoned one of the senior detectives on his force to provide him with a summary of the events which had taken place in Britain’s capital city within the previous twenty-four hours.

  ‘It happened in a place called George Yard, sir,’ Detective Inspector Frederick George Abberline replied, standing in front of Warren’s desk, then went on to explain the location in more detail, because he knew that the commissioner was unfamiliar with the layout of the streets in Whitechapel. And, in fact, with most of the East End of London. Warren’s preferred stamping ground began in Mayfair and ended in Kensington.

  ‘It’s not actually a yard, sir, despite the name. It’s a fairly narrow alleyway that runs between Whitechapel High Street and Wentworth Street.’

  ‘Those names mean nothing to me, Abberline,’ Warren snapped. ‘For God’s sake, man, show me on a map.’

  The request was not unexpected – nor, the Detective Inspector had to admit to himself, entirely unreasonable – but as always it was the commissioner’s attitude which made him bridle.

  Like every other senior officer of the police force of the metropolis, Abberline knew that Charles Warren had no background in law enforcement, and frankly didn’t know why the man had been appointed to the post he held, a question that he doubted the commissioner could answer either. And since Warren had arrived in London, he had made it very clear that he knew almost nothing about police work – some of the measures he had tried to impose made that perfectly obvious – and didn’t much care for either his subordinates at Scotland Yard or his political masters. And this had translated into an attitude of autocratic aloofness, of snapping orders and expecting instant and unquestioning obedience, and that didn’t sit well with the civilian officers under his command.

  Abberline, in contrast, had been a police officer in London for almost his entire adult life. He was forty-five years old, five feet nine inches tall, somewhat overweight and balding, his bushy moustache and side whiskers accentuating, rather than concealing, this condition. He had served in the Metropolitan Police Force for twenty-five years, and had spent over half that time – some fourteen years – policing the streets of Whitechapel. It was an area he knew extremely well, where almost everybody knew him, and where most liked him because of his competence and experience, and his fair and even-handed attitude.

  Abberline took a step to one side and picked up the leather briefcase he had placed on the chair. There were two chairs in front of Warren’s desk but the commissioner had, absolutely typically, not invited the detective inspector to sit in either of them. He much preferred to see his subordinates standing in front of him, and preferably standing to attention, Abberline suspected, but he was never prepared to do that.

  He opened the case, extracted a rolled map from it and then replaced the briefcase on the chair. He placed the map on Warren’s desk, unrolled it and anchored the four
corners with convenient objects: a paperweight, an ink pot and a heavy ruler which secured one side. The map had been cut out of a much larger sheet and showed only the Whitechapel district.

  Abberline took a pencil from his pocket and pointed at an area almost in the centre of the map, the lead tip of the pencil tracing the line of a marked road which ran more or less southwest to north-east.

  ‘That’s Whitechapel High Street, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s only a fairly short stretch of road because at the western end it changes into Aldgate High Street, just here, and to the east it becomes just Whitechapel Road.’

  He moved the pencil down slightly to indicate another road running east-west.

  ‘That’s Commercial Road,’ he went on, ‘one of the main streets in the area. Wentworth Road is just up here’ – Abberline pointed at a narrow road which was slightly north of Whitechapel High Street and ran parallel to it – ‘and again that’s quite a short road that starts at Middlesex Street, here, but only runs as far as the crossroads with Brick Lane. Over to the east, it turns into Old Montague Street.’

  ‘Who the devil named these roads?’ Warren muttered. ‘It’s a complete mess.’

  Abberline assumed, correctly, that this was a rhetorical remark and didn’t reply. Instead, he indicated two faint parallel lines which ran south from Wentworth Street.

  ‘That is George Yard,’ he said.

  ‘And that’s where she was killed?’

  Abberline nodded.

  ‘In fact, she didn’t die in the street itself,’ he added, ‘but in one of the buildings – they’re known simply as the George Yard Buildings – which line the alley.’

  ‘I presume she lived there, then. Was she married? Did her husband do it?’

  ‘At the moment, sir, we have no idea of the identity of the woman, or whether she lived in that building. Or whether she was married, of course. But because of where she was found, and the way her body was lying, the officer in charge of the case – that’s Inspector Reid of H Division in Whitechapel – believes she was possibly an unfortunate who had entered the building in the early hours of the morning with a client and had been killed by him during or after connection.’