The Esther & Jack Enright Box Set

by David Field

  ‘You heard about the murder in Hanbury Street?’ Jack enquired.

  ‘Who hasn’t?’ Esther replied. ‘It’s the talk of the neighbourhood.’

  ‘It was Dark Annie,’ Jack advised her.

  Esther’s hand flew to her mouth and she stared back at him in horror. ‘That can’t just be coincidence, can it?’ she insisted. ‘First Polly Nichols, now Dark Annie. Both of them were women the police wanted to speak to about the guardsman and both of them have been done away with. But what was Annie doing in Hanbury Street, when she had a room in George Yard?’

  ‘She had lodgings in Dorset Street as well,’ Jack disclosed, ‘and it seems that she went back to them two nights before she died. But she didn’t have the money to pay for her bed the night she died, so she went back out on the street to get it. She was intending to sell either her bonnet or herself and she must have met the man who did it in the course of wandering the street.’

  ‘The man?’ Esther echoed. ‘You mean the guardsman?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Even Inspector Reid believes it may have been him, posing as a customer. I read a description of the injuries on the body and believe me, whoever did that meant it and was very handy with something sharp.’

  Esther shuddered and looked Jack directly in the eye. ‘Do you think Polly suspects me of investigating her? Could I be the guardsman’s next target?’

  ‘I really don’t think you need be alarmed,’ Jack advised her, ‘but best stay in your room until we get more information and hopefully catch the man responsible.’

  ‘I hardly ever go out anyway,’ Esther advised him, before breaking into a seductive smile and adding, ‘except on Sundays, with a man who says he might be in love with me.’

  ‘I am, believe me,’ Jack reassured her, ‘and you’ll be in no danger walking out with me, even if I’m not in uniform, but it might be better if we go somewhere other than the local church yard.’

  ‘Like Barking, you mean?’

  ‘Possibly, although we might consider going up west or something. Please don’t cancel our Sunday meetings, Esther — they mean so much to me.’

  Esther got up, walked round the table and threw her arms around Jack before kissing him, then leaning back slightly in order to look him in the eye. ‘Darling Jack, nothing would stop me spending Sunday afternoons with the man I think I may be in love with as well.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Edmund Reid seemed to be making a habit out of attending inquests. These last two had been conducted by the coroner for South East Middlesex, Wynne Baxter, and Reid was slowly losing ground in his efforts to persuade Scotland Yard that he had the matter well in hand and that the person behind it all was an army man.

  First had been the inquest into the death in Bucks Row of Polly Nichols, which had been conducted over four separate days, by the last of which — on 22nd September — the coroner was painfully aware that he was also halfway through the inquest into the butchering of Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street. His summing up at the first inquest was heavily influenced by the evidence that had begun to emerge during the second, with a separate jury, and his words — faithfully recorded by journalists and published the following day — were the first to alert the general public to the possibility that a dangerous lunatic might be at work and still at large. As he advised his first jury:

  ‘It seems astonishing at first thought that the culprit should have escaped detection, for there must surely have been marks of blood about his person. If, however, blood was principally on his hands, the presence of so many slaughter houses in the neighbourhood would make the frequenters of this spot familiar with blood-stained clothes and hands and his appearance might in that way have failed to attract attention while he passed from Bucks Row in the twilight into Whitechapel Road and was lost sight of in the morning’s market traffic.’

  He then drew attention to the fact that this was the third of four murders in the past five months, in which, ‘All four victims were women of middle age, all were married, and had lived apart from their husbands in consequences of intemperate habits and were at the time of their death leading an irregular life and eking out a miserable and precarious existence in common lodging houses.’

  Edmund Reid ground his teeth in silent exasperation as he listened to this last comment. As far as he was concerned, the death of Polly Nichols had been only the second in a series of three, because Emma Smith, who had been attacked in April of that year, had clearly advised those attending her in the hospital to which she had been taken that her attackers had been a gang of pimps out to teach her a lesson. This made Martha Tabram the first and Polly Nichols the second; furthermore, the evidence was not yet fully in on the Annie Chapman matter and the Coroner had no business spreading alarm and despondency with his speculation about a homicidal maniac on the loose, one who could surreptitiously creep up on his victims, silently hack them to pieces and then disappear like an early morning mist.

  Baxter even had the audacity to openly link the last two — Nichols and Chapman — before either jury had returned a verdict, concluding; ‘I suggest to you as a possibility that these two women may have been murdered by the same man with the same object and that in the case of Nichols the wretch was disturbed before he had accomplished his object and having failed in the open street he tries again, within a week of his failure, in a more secluded place.’

  Little wonder that the jury, after only the briefest of consultations, had returned a verdict of ‘wilful murder by a person or persons unknown.’

  ‘There you go, Inspector,’ Sergeant Enright gloated as they left the public seats, ‘we’re dealing with a deranged madman, as I shall advise the Yard.’

  ‘I’ve already submitted my report on the Chapman killing,’ Reid advised him, ‘and I’ve left them in no doubt that it was the work of a blood-thirsty guardsman. I intend to commandeer the records from Wellington Barracks, to identify those who were not on duty on the relevant nights.’

  ‘You’ll need the Yard’s authority for that, which you won’t get,’ Enright replied without relaxing the smirk. ‘You heard the coroner’s conclusion as clearly as I did. The person responsible is a clever lunatic and almost certainly has medical skills. A man with skills like that wouldn’t have taken the Queen’s shilling.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Reid muttered as he sidled his way down between the rows of seats.

  Reid was even more incensed when he received the official post-mortem report from Dr Phillips, ahead of the inquest into the death of Annie Chapman, at which it would be delivered to the gentlemen of the press with their sharpened pencils and their noses for screaming headlines. George Bagster Phillips was an experienced police surgeon whose medical opinions tended to be received like the Holy Grail. He had concluded that: ‘Obviously the work was that of an expert — of one, at least, who had such knowledge of anatomical or pathological examinations as to be enabled to secure the pelvic organs with one sweep of the knife, which must therefore have been at least five or six inches in length, probably more. The appearance of the cuts confirmed me in the opinion that the instrument, like the one which divided the neck, had been of a very sharp character. The mode in which the knife had been used seemed to indicate great anatomical knowledge.’

  On the final day of the Annie Chapman inquest Dr Phillips, in answer to specific questions from the coroner, ruled out the use of a bayonet to inflict the injuries he had examined on the corpse of the deceased, thus further distancing any connection between that murder and that of Martha Tabram and insisted that the weapon used would not even be likely to be found among post-mortem medical implements. He also ruled out any knife used in the leather trades, on the ground that they would not be long enough and speculated that the victim’s throat had been cut as the first action, thereby rendering Annie unconscious, if not instantly dead, before the other gruesome incisions were made and the uterus and upper vagina were completely removed and not found among the assorted viscera left lying on the victim’s shoulder.

/>   As if determined to give the press all the stomach-churning ammunition they needed, Coroner Baxter asked Phillips how long such a grisly process would have taken, to which Phillips replied, ‘I think I can guide you by saying that I myself could not have performed all the injuries I saw on that woman, even without a struggle, in under a quarter of an hour. If I had done it in a deliberate way, such as would fall to the duties of a surgeon, it would probably have taken me the best part of an hour. The whole inference seems to me that the operation was performed to enable the perpetrator to obtain possession of these parts of the body.’

  In his summary to the jury, the coroner made much of the fact that the killer could not have been aware of how many people were living in the house that went with the yard of 29 Hanbury Street, and the hours which they kept, but that he had nevertheless committed a series of savage surgical outrages on the body of a woman he had enticed into the yard on the pretence of requiring her sexual services. He went on to emphasise that the sexual organs that had been removed might have been the entire object of the offender’s deranged actions, given that there was a ready market for such things in medical schools — indeed, the person responsible might be attending just such an establishment.

  His eyes firmly fixed on Reid, in the third row from the front of the packed hall, the coroner added, ‘Surely, it is not too much even yet to hope that the ingenuity of our detective force will succeed in unearthing this monster. It is not as if there were no clue to the character of the criminal or the cause of his crime. His object is clearly divulged. His anatomical skill carries him out of the category of a common criminal, for his knowledge could only have been obtained by assisting at post-mortems, or by frequenting the post-mortem room … we should know that he was a foreigner of dark complexion, over forty years of age, a little taller than the deceased, of shabby genteel appearance, with a brown deer-stalker hat on his head and a dark coat on his back. If your views accord with mine, you will be of opinion that we are confronted with a murder of no ordinary character, committed not from jealously, revenge, or robbery, but from motives less adequate than the many which still disgrace our civilisation, mar our progress and blot the pages of our Christianity.’

  The predictable verdict was yet another murder ‘by a person or persons unknown’, but Reid was convinced that the person behind it all was not unknown to him, if only his hands were left sufficiently free for him to prove it.

  Perhaps inevitably, those with nothing else to occupy their minds began writing to the newspapers with their theories regarding the person responsible for the two latest outrages and the editors were encouraged to pen one gruesome article after another. The speculation ranged from a discharged wounded serviceman with a grudge, to a Jewish conspiracy to eliminate all the Gentiles from East London. Then there were those who were convinced that the person responsible was a surgeon with a ‘down’ on prostitutes as the result of contracting syphilis, which was known to lead, in its final manifestation, to insanity. But one letter in particular had raised the fear level in the back alleys of Whitechapel.

  It had been sent to the Central News Agency in London and was published in the same edition of the dailies that featured the findings of the Annie Chapman coronial jury. It was from a man who was taunting the authorities over their inability to catch him, revelling in the thrill he got from what he called ‘my funny little games’ and promising to cut the ears from his next victim and send them to the police. He signed himself ‘Jack the Ripper’ and a name had now been given to the nightmare stalking the dark alleyways of gas-lit Whitechapel and Spitalfields.

  ‘Seen the morning papers?’ Percy Enright gloated as he walked into Reid’s office without knocking and threw several national dailies onto his desk upside down, so that Reid could peruse them, if he hadn’t already. Indeed he had and he was more than angrily aware of the two inch banner headlines advising the local populace of the ‘deranged lunatic’ on the loose, of the ‘mad doctor in search of women’s most intimate body parts’ and of ‘the seeming inability of the police of this city to catch a maniac who must have been covered from head to foot in the blood of his victims.’

  ‘So where do you suggest that we look, now that your theories of a revengeful prostitute have been blown out of the water?’ Enright demanded.

  ‘We?’ Reid demanded, the colour rising in his face.

  ‘Are you rejecting the assistance of Scotland Yard?’ Enright enquired.

  ‘Of course not,’ Reid replied through gritted teeth.

  ‘Perhaps as well,’ Enright smiled back unpleasantly, ‘since I’ve sent for Abberline.’

  ‘Was that really necessary?’

  ‘I rather think so, given that two local divisions have come up with nothing at the present time,’ Enright replied.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Esther threw another handful of corn from the bag that Jack held open in his lap and a cluster of appreciative pigeons bobbed and cooed around their feet on the bench in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Another Sunday, another session of hand-holding and another exchange of kisses, as the warm Autumn sun added to the glow of the occasion.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me your real name’s Jackson?’ Esther enquired teasingly.

  ‘Because it’s embarrassing to my mind. And only my mother calls me that. Even Lucy calls me Jack, if she wants to keep in my good books.’

  ‘How did she get on with that young man she was trying to attract that day we were there?’

  ‘Very well, it would seem, although she’s giving you all the credit, since the fool made a polite comment about her gown and that led to a more general conversation.’

  ‘She’s so beautiful, she surely shouldn’t need to worry at all about attracting the right sort of young man.’

  ‘A bit like you, you mean?’ Jack smiled at her. ‘I can’t believe I’m the first young man you’ve ever walked out with.’

  ‘Jack, use your intelligence,’ Esther replied. ‘I’m Jewish, I’m a seamstress by profession and I live in a common lodging house in Spitalfields. That’s hardly likely to have them rushing to knock on my door, is it?’

  ‘But all of those excuses you just gave don’t explain why no-one has ever before spotted your beauty, inside and out.’

  ‘Maybe no-one’s ever looked,’ Esher suggested. ‘Maybe it took the eagle eye of a police constable to look beyond the prejudice — racial and social.’

  ‘It certainly took the eagle eye of a Detective Sergeant from Scotland Yard,’ Jack chuckled. ‘It’s a good job Uncle Percy’s in his early fifties, else I’d have a serious rival there. Seems that he gave my mother a very glowing report about you.’

  ‘Talking of Scotland Yard, it seems to me that the key to this entire business is to be found in George Yard. Martha was killed there on a night when Polly Nichols was in the company of Pearly Poll and Annie Chapman was known to stay there from time to time. Everything comes back to that dreadful doss house in there. We know that some sort of military man pays the rent for a room on the very landing where Martha was stabbed and two women who might have been able to give us a clue about what happened to Martha in there have been killed by someone who might have access to sharp weapons.’

  Jack whistled quietly. ‘You have a very tidy mind for this sort of thing; it’s a pity we don’t recruit women into the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘Who knows, if one day we get the vote, like some people are beginning to suggest we should, that might change. Then you’ll have to look to your laurels, Jackson Enright.’

  ‘Please don’t call me Jackson!’ he pleaded.

  ‘I seem to recall that you told me that Annie Chapman had been staying at 35 Dorset Street just before she died.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So — when Pearly Poll gave evidence at the inquest into Martha’s death, that’s the address she gave as well.’

  ‘You mean that she and Annie once shared the same address?’

  ‘Yes, except that it doesn’t take us any further, doe
s it? We can connect the two women at that doss house in George Yard as well and that’s where Martha died and where Annie had been staying until two nights before she was murdered. Perhaps the same “military type” man that rents the room in George Yard is the killer?’

  ‘I’m sure Inspector Reid will have thought of that.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt he has,’ Esther agreed, ‘but does he have any plans to keep watch for the man when he next calls to pay the rent?’

  ‘No idea, but I’ll suggest it to him,’ Jack replied eagerly. ‘Or perhaps the senior Scotland Yard man when he comes down tomorrow. Inspector Reid’s chewing his hat over that and he’s blaming Uncle Percy.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make it awkward for you, having Percy for an uncle?’

  ‘Not normally, but he and Inspector Reid have certainly got their bootlaces entangled over these latest murders. Never mind, the Inspector can’t fault me for the way I carry out my duties and Uncle Percy has such a high opinion of you that he wouldn’t do anything to prejudice my career advancement.’

  ‘Why would your career advancement have anything to do with me?’ Esther enquired.

  Jack went bright red with embarrassment before suggesting that they catch the horse bus back to the East End.

  ‘Not a day too soon, it would seem,’ Inspector Fred Abberline observed sarcastically as he walked into Reid’s office without knocking and seated himself without being invited to do so. Reid rose from behind his desk and offered the newcomer his chair.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be wanting the use of my office while you’re here?’ he enquired acidly.

  Abberline smiled back reassuringly. ‘I spent long enough behind that desk in the old days, when I used to run you ragged. Keep it for the time being, Edmund. I’m going to be kept pretty busy running between police stations for most of today anyway, by the sound of it.’