Warren knew that he was facing a protracted and incredibly painful death, and his beloved wife an even more hideous fate, but there was one question he needed answering before the man in front of him started shooting.
‘One favour,’ he said. ‘I just need to know for sure. You were responsible for all those killings in the East End? The six murders?’
‘You know I was. The other one, the very first killing of the woman called Smith, that was nothing to do with me, but it gave me the idea.’
‘Thank you,’ Warren said. ‘I just needed to hear that from your own lips.’
‘Why?’ Pedachenko asked, clearly puzzled.
‘For justice,’ Warren replied, and lifted his right arm high above his head.
Instantly, a shot rang out, the flat crack of a heavy-calibre rifle rather than the more distinctive noise of a pistol.
Pedachenko screamed and fell backwards to the ground, dropping both weapons and clutching at his stomach, a crimson stain instantly blooming across his clothes.
Warren jumped down from the cart and picked up the two pistols, then stepped over and looked down at the badly wounded man.
‘Who?’ Pedachenko gasped.
‘My manservant,’ Warren replied. ‘Ryan is a very accomplished shot, and I provided him with one of my favourite rifles, my Martini-Henry. He delivered the box to the warehouse, then drove away and waited for you to turn up. I was glad that you were prompt. I could breathe without too much difficulty inside that box but it got very hot and extremely uncomfortable quite quickly. And when you did appear, he simply followed you in his cart at a distance until you turned off the road, when he stopped and continued on foot.’
Warren paused and glanced back the way the cart had come, and then pointed.
‘He’s obviously been watching us from that small copse of trees just over there, waiting for my signal. It was an incredibly easy shot for him, but I told him to aim for your stomach, because I wanted you conscious, at least for a while.’
Pedachenko moaned in pain.
‘You mean you dropped your pistol deliberately?’ he murmured, his voice racked with agony.
‘No. I had hoped to take care of you myself. Ryan was my insurance policy.’
‘Unfair,’ the Russian whispered. ‘I thought you English were supposed to be sporting?’
Warren shook his head.
‘I gave you more of a chance than you ever gave any of the women that you butchered on the streets of Whitechapel. And I will extend you one small mercy now.’
‘What?’
‘This,’ Warren replied.
He raised Pedachenko’s own revolver, aimed the weapon at the Russian’s chest and pulled the trigger. The Russian’s body jerked once and then lay still.
‘Was that the way you wanted it, sir?’ Ryan asked, walking up to where Warren stood, looking down at the dead body of the man who had become known as Jack the Ripper.
‘Thank you, Thomas,’ he said. ‘That was exactly the way I wanted it.’
‘And it was definitely him?’
‘Definitely. He admitted it to me himself, though of course we’d never have managed to prove it. But this way, we don’t have to. Now give me a hand with him.’
The two men dragged the corpse of the Russian around to the rear of the cart, hoisted it up with little difficulty – he wasn’t a big man – and dropped it unceremoniously into the box. They replaced the inner wooden panel, then nailed the lid firmly shut. Warren took an address label from his pocket, ripped off the ones which he had been told to attach to the box and applied the new one.
‘Right, Thomas,’ he said, as the two men climbed up into the driving seat of the cart. ‘There’s another warehouse not too far away where we can get rid of this. Then we’ll collect the other cart and head home.’
Ryan turned the vehicle round, and they drove a short distance back the way they’d come, towards Bermondsey. Twenty minutes later, Warren and Ryan lifted down the box from the back of the cart and handed it over to a company which specialized in shipping goods abroad. Warren paid the charge the foreman demanded, and then the two men drove away.
Monday, 19 November 1888
London
Mary Kelly’s funeral was characterized by a wave of emotional distress on the part of the public. None of her relatives made themselves known, and so the cost of her funeral was borne in its entirety by the verger of St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, Henry Wilton. Mary’s body had been lying in the mortuary attached to this place of worship since it had been discovered.
The funeral began at noon, the time signalled by the tolling of the church bell, and a crowd of spectators which numbered several thousand quickly assembled outside the building. At about half past twelve the funeral cortège left the church. Mary Kelly’s coffin – a clearly expensive piece of work made from oak and elm, and with polished metal mounts – was carried in the leading cart, which was drawn by two horses. On the coffin was a metal plate which bore the tersest of inscriptions and the name by which she liked to be known: ‘Marie Jeannette Kelly, died 9th Nov. 1888, aged 25 years.’
Following this cart were two mourning coaches, but with only eight occupants in total. The crowd which had gathered outside the church accompanied and surrounded the procession as it started moving down the road, immediately blocking the thoroughfare and preventing other traffic from moving, and the police had to force their way through the mass of humanity to clear a path for the three funeral vehicles. The procession took some time to traverse the length of the Hackney Road before arriving at Leytonstone and the Roman Catholic Cemetery of St Patrick, where the coffin and the mutilated remains of its young occupant were laid to rest.
Because of the ferocity of the attack on this latest victim of Jack the Ripper, the mood of the crowd ran the gamut of emotions. Anger, fear and sorrow vied for supremacy. Men removed their hats and bowed their heads as Mary Kelly began her sad final journey. Women – and there were far more women than men there – cried openly, and many tried to touch the coffin as it passed. According to the report in the Advertiser, ‘the sight was quite remarkable, and the emotion natural and unconstrained.’
Unfortunately, the police were no further forward in their hunt for the killer after the brutal murder of Mary Kelly than they had been before, and the newspapers were quick to point this out. The Times summed up the situation thus:
The murders, so cunningly continued, are carried out with a completeness which altogether baffles investigators. Not a trace is left of the murderer, and there is no purpose in the crime to afford the slightest clue, such as would be afforded in other crimes almost without exception. All that the police can hope is that some accidental circumstance will lead to a trace which may be followed to a successful conclusion.
But no such ‘accidental circumstance’ appeared in the least bit likely to occur, at least in the considered opinion of Inspector Frederick George Abberline, still based at the Bethnal Green police station and hoping for either a clue or inspiration, unless the man known as Jack the Ripper suddenly became very careless indeed.
The Metropolitan and City Police Forces would just have to continue their investigations and their interviews, and their plodding and routine police work, but nobody in either force seriously expected that they would ever manage to identify the killer and bring him to justice.
‘Have you got any more good ideas, Fred?’ Inspector Chandler asked, as the two men sat on opposite sides of the conference table at Bethnal Green looking at the latest crop of interview reports and statements from neighbours and residents of the properties surrounding Miller’s Court, all of which – just as the two officers had expected – contained no useful information whatsoever.
Abberline shook his head.
‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘I think we’ve tried pretty much everything we can. I hate to say this, but I think the newspapers are right. I don’t believe that detection, that police work, is ever going to bring this man to justice. The only way h
e’s ever going to be caught is if somebody stumbles upon him when he’s carrying out a murder, and if you want my opinion, I think he’s too clever and cautious to ever allow that to happen. After all, he’s now done six murders in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, and the only solid leads we’ve had are from a tiny handful of people who’ve seen a man either with the victim or in the vicinity at about the time the murder was committed. We don’t even know if any of those people actually saw the killer. As far as I can see, there’s nothing we can do to stop him carrying on murdering prostitutes in the East End of London. As many as he likes, and as often as he likes.’
‘It might be better now that Warren has gone,’ Chandler suggested. ‘The new bloke, whoever it is, might be more amenable to some of our ideas.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I meant to ask you,’ Chandler went on, ‘I know you had that idea about the locations of the killings perhaps being important for some reason, because of the shape they made on the ground. Did you ever get anywhere with that?’
Abberline shook his head.
‘No. I thought there was something there when I plotted the position of the first five, but the last killing, Mary Kelly, that doesn’t fit at all, as far as I can see. So I suppose that Warren was right about that, at least. It was just a coincidence that the murders formed those two triangles.’
‘Unless the killer was starting a completely new pattern with Kelly.’
‘I never thought of that. Maybe you’re right. We’ll only know when he’s done a couple more, I suppose.’
‘So you do think that there’ll be more killings?’ Chandler asked.
‘I think it’s almost certain,’ Abberline replied. ‘After all, what is there to stop him’?
Thursday, 22 November 1888
London
In the early evening, two men sitting in a cart drawn by a single horse proceeded along the Strand at a leisurely pace. In the back of the vehicle was a sturdy wooden box measuring perhaps three feet by four feet and around a foot deep, to which was attached a single address label.
‘I think that’s it over there,’ one of the men said, and pointed across to the other side of the road, where he had seen a street sign indicating Denmark Court.
The other man steered the cart through the traffic that was proceeding up and down the main road and pulled up outside one of the buildings in the court. They both climbed down from the vehicle and one walked back to the rear of the cart to release the tailgate while the other knocked on the door of the adjacent building.
After a few moments, the door opened and an elderly grey-haired man peered out curiously.
‘Got a delivery for you.’
‘We’re not expecting anything,’ the old man replied.
‘Dunno about that, but we’ve been told to bring this here. This is the Westminster Synagogue, in’t it?’
‘Yes, but – oh, very well. You’d better bring it inside.’
Three minutes later, the two deliverymen turned the cart around and retraced their steps. It had been the last delivery of the day for them, and they were now able to return to their homes.
Inside the synagogue, the elderly rabbi searched for a few minutes until he found a screwdriver, then he began raising the lid of the wooden box. When it came free, he put it to one side. On top of the mass of packing material which concealed the contents was a small piece of white card on which a few words had been printed in block capitals. He picked it up and read the text: ‘FOUND UNDER THE TEMPLE MOUNT, JERUSALEM’.
The rabbi read the words twice with a puzzled expression, then put the card aside and lifted out the packing material. For a few moments, he simply crouched beside the wooden box and stared in incomprehension and disbelief at what it contained. He wondered if it was some kind of an elaborate joke, but that made no sense at all.
Finally, his mind managed to process what his eyes were showing him, and he fell slowly to his knees, heedless of the tears streaming down his face. Tentatively, hardly daring to breathe, he reached out and reverently ran his fingers down the stem of the golden menorah. The metal was cold to the touch, but his body felt as if it was flushing with heat, almost ready to burst into flames, with the strength of the emotions coursing through it.
His lips began to almost silently recite the preamble to every Jewish prayer, a preamble which every Jew knows as well as his own name:
‘Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam.’
Blessed are You, Lord, our God, King of the universe.
The sacred relic, the single most precious possession of the entire Jewish nation, lost for almost two millennia, had finally, and completely inexplicably, come home.
Wednesday, 12 December 1888
Paris
The smell in the warehouse had been getting progressively worse for the last two weeks, and finally the foreman of the shipping company had had enough. He called up two of his men and between them they worked their way from one end of the warehouse to the other, using their noses as they tried to track down the source.
Eventually, one of them pointed to a wooden crate placed against the wall on one side of the warehouse. It was marked only with the Paris address of the shipping company, and the annotation that it would be picked up by a Monsieur Duvall.
One by one, the three men leant closer to the crate to take a sniff, and each quickly recoiled. The foreman told the two men to wait there, collected a crowbar, stuck the point into the gap between the base and the lid and levered it off.
The moment he did so, the smell redoubled in strength, and a rotting corpse tumbled free onto the floor.
The gendarmes were called immediately, and quickly ascertained that the dead man had been shot twice, once in the stomach and once through the heart. But they found no identification on the body, and all their enquiries were inconclusive.
All they did discover was that the crate had been sent from London, but nobody at the shipping company there recalled who had delivered it, or anything about them. Enquiries for a Monsieur Duvall produced hundreds of possible suspects, because ‘Duvall’ was an extremely common name in France. None of the people interviewed by the gendarmes appeared to have any connection whatsoever with the body.
The corpse was quickly buried in an unmarked grave in a local cemetery, and after a month or so, during which they made no progress whatsoever with their investigation of the murder, the French police closed the case.
1889
London
Within a month of his resignation, Sir Charles Warren returned to military duties, and in 1889 he was sent out to command the garrison at Singapore, taking his household with him, and doing his best to forget entirely the events of the autumn and winter of 1888.
One entirely unexpected benefit of the Whitechapel murders was that the killings focused the attention of the world on that small area of the city of London, which resulted in calls for the appalling conditions there to be improved. Numerous public benefactors and other prominent individuals whose names are well-known even today – people like Dr Thomas Barnado, George Bernard Shaw, the social reformer Beatrice Potter and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – looked at the conditions in the East End of London and found them severely wanting.
The evangelist General William Booth established a Christian mission in Whitechapel to provide food and shelter to the destitute, albeit with a fair dose of compulsory religious indoctrination making the pill rather more bitter to swallow, and this organization later metamorphosed into the Salvation Army.
Members of Parliament and the newspapers took up the banner as well, and the desperate conditions in Whitechapel and the surrounding areas would, over the coming years, slowly – very slowly, in fact – begin to improve.
In the weeks following the murder of Mary Kelly, the police presence in the Whitechapel area, both of uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives, and that of the volunteer patrols and vigilante groups, was maintained at a very high level.
As had occurred with the previous murde
rs, the police were deluged with letters offering advice and possible leads to the identity of the killer. The total ran into the thousands, and every one of them had to be investigated, at least to some extent. But by the following spring, with no further murders to investigate, Inspector Abberline issued orders for the various patrols to be scaled back and the amateurs began to give up their voluntary duties. The extra police who had been appointed to the East End of London were recalled and redeployed.
But for months afterwards Abberline puzzled over the killings, wondering if it was purely coincidental that they had ceased on almost the very day that Sir Charles Warren had resigned from his post as the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. But he still had no leads, and nothing to go on, and finally turned his attention to other matters.
In the course of the investigation, hundreds of people had been questioned and numerous arrests made, but all without a single positive result. Nobody – not one person – would ever be charged in connection with any aspect of the Whitechapel murders.
Like the snow in the spring, and as silently and as inexplicably as he had arrived, Jack the Ripper seemed to have simply vanished into thin air.
Author’s Note
Jack the Ripper
In reality, the true identity of the mass murderer or serial killer known as Jack the Ripper will almost certainly never be discovered. Much of the original evidence about the case has been mislaid, lost or destroyed, and the written recollections of many of the people involved in the investigation can be shown to contain serious errors of fact and/or timing. At this remove, it is very difficult to confirm any fact or theory, but despite that almost every year some new suspect appears briefly in the limelight, only to fade away again in the face of critical analysis.
The Ripper Secret Page 40