The Abduction of Pretty Penny

by Leonard Goldberg

  We arrived at the entrance to the dark passageway and, as instructed, I remained in the motor vehicle with the hound, while the driver raced on foot into the dwelling from which The Ripper had supposedly escaped. Most of the windows in the neighborhood were now lighted, with the occupants leaning out to view the ongoing police activity. A few came down to the passageway but were quickly turned away. Toby Two’s tail began to wag happily, which informed me that Joanna was approaching.

  “Well, well, it is good to see you again,” said Joanna, reaching down to scratch the head of the most peculiar-appearing animal. The dog had many features of a long-haired spaniel, but the floppy ears, sad eyes, and snout were those of a bloodhound. Being the offspring of a second-generation Toby and an amorous bloodhound endowed her with the keenest sense of smell imaginable, which she merrily put to work. Toby Two sat on her haunches and stared up at Joanna, as if awaiting directions.

  “Now we are about to play a game you so enjoy,” Joanna said, and delved into her purse for the jar of hair pomade she had purchased from the Widow Marley. She placed the unopened jar under Toby Two’s nose for a brief few seconds and watched the dog’s tail wag at its distinctive lavender aroma. Only then did Joanna hand the jar to the driver and ask, “Which way is the wind blowing tonight?”

  “East to west, ma’am,” he replied.

  “I would like you to drive west, with the wind, and after you have traveled several miles dispose of the jar.”

  “Very good, ma’am.”

  Joanna took hold of Toby Two’s leash and led her into a brightly lighted parlor, where the dog abruptly stopped in her tracks, with her tail now pointed straight as an arrow. Lestrade and his team watched with great interest while they stepped away from the dog’s intended path. Toby Two began straining on her leash, with her nose directed to the kitchen area. Another detective came out of the kitchen and, seeing the circumstances, quickly moved aside.

  “Go, girl!” Joanna commanded, and released the leash.

  Toby Two dashed through the kitchen door and into an oversized storage closet next to it. She went directly to a worn rug near the wall and pawed furiously at it. Joanna hurried over and stomped on the rug, expecting a hollow sound to return, but none came. Stepping back, she reconsidered the situation before kicking the rug away. Under it and against the wall was a metal handle lying flat on the floor. Joanna reached down and pulled on it, which caused the floor to give, but no more than a centimeter. She released the handle and the floor dropped back into place.

  “I need a strong hand!” she called out.

  A burly detective, with the physique of a wrestler, came over and, with a mighty jerk, opened up a most unusual trapdoor. Its top had a wooden surface, while its underside was lined with thick sacks of sand which accounted for its heavy weight.

  “Clever,” Joanna remarked. “I suspect the entire ceiling of the cellar is covered with sandbags, which keeps the sound dull when the floor above is stomped upon. It also renders the space soundproof, which would prevent screams from his victims being heard.”

  Lestrade quickly stepped over and peered down at the narrow staircase that led to the darkened cellar. “He may be hiding in there.”

  Joanna shook her head. “He is gone.”

  “What makes you so confident?”

  “The rug,” Joanna replied. “Had he entered via the trapdoor and closed it, he could not have pulled the rug back into place.”

  “Still,” Lestrade said, reaching for his revolver, “we will take no chances.”

  With two detectives close behind him, Lestrade slowly stepped down the stairs, lighting the way into the darkness with his torch. There were no sounds to be heard as we all wondered what ghastly sights awaited us in this secret chamber of horrors. Toby Two’s nose had informed us that Pretty Penny was imprisoned there but could not tell us if she was alive. Finally, after a long silence, Lestrade called up, “All clear!”

  Joanna and I carefully descended the stairs, with the inspector’s torch lighting our way. The air was quite musty and stale from lack of ventilation. In addition, I detected the smell of body decay, which I was all too familiar with from my time in the autopsy room. One of the detectives found a light switch on the wall and turned it on, but it provided limited illumination, for there was only a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. But it was enough to bring into view the most macabre sights imaginable. On a wall above a workbench was nailed a collection of Jack the Ripper’s trophies. There were row upon row of dried-out ovaries and uteruses, some still attached to intact vaginas, which had been dissected out en bloc. It was so disgusting that even a seasoned detective was forced to look away and swallow back his nausea.

  “Only the most evil of minds could construct a museum for such mementos,” Lestrade commented, directing his torch at the dissected organs. “Yet they seem so well preserved, with little evidence of rot.”

  “That is because they have been mummified,” Joanna elucidated, and pointed to the workbench, upon which were scalpels and other dissecting instruments. Sitting next to them were airtight glass containers that held several noses and ears which were heavily dusted with white powder. “This is how one goes about the process of mummification. The various organs are placed in airtight jars and covered with baking soda, which removes every drop of moisture, causing desiccation, which in turn prevents decay.”

  “An absolute madman,” said Lestrade, glancing around the dimly lighted cellar.

  “But one with a mission,” Joanna noted, and walked over to the far corner of the room, which held a metal table, six feet in length, with side drains to siphon off unwanted bodily fluids. Close by was a stand filled with a variety of surgical instruments, including knives, scalpels, saws, hemostats, retractors, and toothed forceps.

  It took me a moment to make the connection. “Good Lord! He was performing autopsies down here.”

  “But why and on whom?” Lestrade asked at once. “The bodies of his victims were always found at the crime scene.”

  “Not all,” Joanna informed, and reminded him of the missing Unfortunates in the past whose corpses were never found.

  “So he is back to his old tricks.”

  “So it would seem.”

  A detective hurried over and said, “Inspector, there is no sign of the girl.”

  “Please do not tell me he has escaped with his captive,” Lestrade growled unhappily.

  “But that appears to be the case, sir.”

  “She is here,” said Joanna.

  “What allows you to be so certain, may I ask?”

  Joanna motioned to the end of the workbench beyond the instruments and organs being preserved.

  Lestrade squinted his eyes in the dimness. “I see nothing other than his gruesome workings.”

  “Look again.”

  “I see a jar,” Lestrade noted as he directed his torch to the item.

  “It is the jar of pomade Pretty Penny uses to make her hair glisten, and which The Ripper recently purchased from the girl’s hairdresser,” said Joanna. “And next to it is a final helping of apple spice candy that is meant to be served to Pretty Penny on her execution day.”

  “But there is no sign of her,” Lestrade argued mildly.

  “And there was no sign of a trapdoor leading down to the cellar, either,” Joanna rebutted, and turned to the detective. “You and your men must search again, and be certain to stomp on every square foot.”

  “But we have done that, madam.”

  “Do it once more,” she insisted. “But this time stomp harder and listen for even the slightest echo.”

  Lestrade nodded his consent and watched the detective hurry away before coming back to Joanna. “Assuming he did autopsies in this cellar, how could he dispose of the corpses? That would be no easy task even if dismembered.”

  “Not as difficult as one might suppose,” Joanna said, and gestured to a large container of lye beneath the instrument table. “He simply buried them in the earth.”
/>   “But where? This cellar is not nearly large enough for a graveyard.”

  Joanna pointed to a stack of large canvas sacks in the near corner. “I suspect the bodies were placed in those sacks and covered with lye, which transforms them into a brown pulp in a matter of days.”

  “But those sacks are not large enough to hold a whole corpse,” Lestrade argued.

  “He dismembered them first and spread their limbs elsewhere around London, as the commissioner so aptly described.”

  The inspector rubbed at his chin, considering the matter further. “But burying these large sacks is no simple task, for he’d have to dig a bloody big pit.”

  “Oh, there are ways around that,” Joanna explained. “All he needed was to find abandoned water wells in the countryside, some of which go a hundred feet or more deep. The Ripper could drop the sacks in, cover them with a layer of rocks or sand, and move on to the next.”

  “The lye no doubt offsets the noxious smell as well.”

  My wife nodded. “An added benefit.”

  A young detective called out from the workbench, “Sir, we have found a framed letter in one of the lower drawers!”

  “What does it say?” asked Lestrade.

  “It seems to be a notification from the Lancet.”

  “A notification of what sort?”

  “One of rejection, I would say.”

  “Ah, yes, the final piece of the puzzle,” said Joanna, as a look of satisfaction crossed her face.

  “Which is?” Lestrade inquired.

  “His motivation for the mutilated murders,” my wife said, reaching for the framed letter which she dusted off before reading aloud, “‘From the editor of the Lancet,’ dated 1889.”

  “Denying publication of his research no doubt,” I interjected.

  Joanna nodded. “It reads as follows:

  “Dear Sir,

  “We regret to inform you that we shall be unable to publish your study in the Lancet. Your contention that the criminal behavior of the two women can be attributed to lesions in the frontal cortex is not supported by the data. Our panel of experts was of the opinion that the brain lesions were the result of repeated trauma and did not show the structural lesions you proposed were present. Furthermore, your conclusion that the increased size and weight of the female sex organs accounted for the subjects’ promiscuity is without merit. Should you wish to resubmit your study at a later date, we would be obliged to again review it, but only if the underlying data is far more convincing.”

  “Is Willoughby’s name on the letter?” I asked quickly.

  “It is not to be seen, for it has been blacked out with dark ink,” she replied, holding the frame closer to Lestrade’s torch. “It would seem he wanted the motivation of the rebuke, but not the shame associated with it.”

  “So he persevered, even to the point of embarrassing himself before the Royal Society,” I recalled. “Which of course was the sternest of rebukes.”

  “That, too, was well deserved.”

  “So it was all an experiment,” Lestrade concluded. “He murdered those women hoping to advance science.”

  “It was done mainly to advance himself and gain the fame of an important medical discovery,” said Joanna. “Now let us find his laboratory books, which will prove the obvious.”

  “What would their appearance be, ma’am?” asked the young detective.

  “They are large notebooks, with thick covers.”

  The detective pointed to an opened drawer beneath the workbench. “Such books were beside the framed letter.”

  “Excellent,” Joanna said, and hurried over to the drawer to extract a well-worn laboratory book, which she opened and held up to the light.

  We gathered as my wife began to slowly turn its pages one by one until she came to the most revealing one.

  “That is something you would expect to find in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory,” said I, making no effort to hide my revulsion, as I read over her shoulder.

  Before me was a chart that listed the horrific data on the organs Willoughby had dissected from the mutilated corpses. Every detail was so carefully printed out. The only blank spaces were next to the letters P.P., which no doubt stood for Pretty Penny.

  “Please interpret for us, Dr. Watson,” Lestrade requested.

  “He has recorded the names of his victims and the weights of their ovaries and uteruses. All are within normal limits except that of B.H., with readings of fourteen grams and eighty-two grams, which are far above normal. She also had a benign brain tumor called a meningioma.”

  “Which Willoughby no doubt believed would prove his hypothesis that the sex organs’ large size, together with the brain lesion, would account for the woman’s abnormal behavior,” Joanna reasoned.

  I turned to the following page, which contained a more detailed description of the brain lesion. “Except that the meningioma was located in the occipital area, where it would cause visual problems and not personality change.”

  “Science gone mad,” said Lestrade, and again studied the rejection letter from the Lancet. “Perhaps our experts at the Yard can remove the black stain and reveal Dr. Willoughby’s name.”

  “It would be interesting, but not proof that the addressee was The Ripper,” Joanna rebutted. “Any good barrister would claim the letter was stolen long ago and no one could disprove it. We require an eyewitness to satisfy the court.”

  “Or a clear fingerprint.”

  “That would do nicely as well.”

  The lead detective returned, shaking his head. “I am afraid we have come up empty, ma’am.”

  “Perhaps we should bring Toby Two down,” I suggested.

  “Unfortunately, she will be of little help in this instance,” said Joanna. “This entire cellar is contaminated with the smell of cadavers, which all dogs find irresistible. She would literally roll around on the floor next to the autopsy table, oblivious to all other scents.”

  “So we must conclude that Pretty Penny is gone,” Lestrade said gloomily.

  “She is here,” Joanna asserted once again, and began to walk back and forth across the cellar, head down, stomping on the floor with each step. She continued carefully pacing over every square foot, even testing the floor under the workbench and autopsy table, but without results. Finally, she moved over to the staircase and examined the area beneath it but found nothing of interest. Her gaze went around the cellar once more and came to rest on the stack of large canvas sacks which stood in a far corner.

  The detective followed her line of vision and anticipated her question. “We searched the stack as well and found nothing hidden.”

  “Did you look beneath them?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We wheeled the trolley aside and inspected every inch under it.”

  Joanna’s brow went up. “Wheeled, you say?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Like most trolleys used for transport, this one had four wheels.”

  “But why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why wheels, my good fellow? It has wheels because it was meant to be moved,” she explained. “Well then, we must ask ourselves for what purpose? Certainly not to travel around the cellar, for if you wished a sack, you would simply walk over and take one. Which leaves us with only one explanation for its movement. It must be concealing something and needs to be periodically pushed aside.”

  “But there was no evidence of a pit or space beneath it.”

  “Did you see tracks on the floor made by the trolley?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And how far did those tracks travel?”

  “Only a yard or so.”

  “Which is all that would be required for The Ripper to reach his desired object,” Joanna deduced. “Please move it out of the corner.”

  Once the area beneath the trolley was cleared, she used her foot to sweep away the thick grime that covered the floor. A deep, straight crack appeared, which was connected at right angles to yet another. Again using her foot, my wife clea
red aside more grime, and the outline of a trapdoor came into view. If there was illumination below, it was not enough to pierce through the cracks in the wood. No sounds could be heard. As with the trapdoor upstairs, a metal handle was situated next to the wall itself.

  The burly detective was beckoned and hurried over to pull open the trapdoor, which had sandbags attached to its underneath surface. Warm air rushed up at us and in a moment dissipated. Below was total darkness and the strong odor of stale, dried blood. We collectively held our breaths, expecting the worst.

  “Hello!” Joanna called down.

  There was a stretch of time before a weak, tiny voice replied, “Please let me go.”

  “We are Scotland Yard here to rescue you,” said Joanna.

  A stream of torches lighted the dark pit, which had dimensions of approximately ten by ten feet. The floor, but not the walls, was covered with planks of wood. In the center of the small dungeon was the badly frightened Pretty Penny, whose attractive face was still recognizable but whose lower body was painted with old blood and dark dirt. She was sitting on the floor, for there was no furniture to be seen.

  “Are you injured?” Joanna asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Pretty Penny replied pitifully.

  “Is the blood not yours?”

  “It is his,” she responded. “He threw up on me.”

  To a man there was not one of us who did not wish to have his hands on the throat of this maniacal monster whose cruelty knew no bounds.

  “We shall come down for you and have you cleaned up properly,” Joanna told her in a gentle voice.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Pretty Penny said, and began to weep.

  A ladder was found in a nearby corner of the cellar and brought over, which a detective used to descend into the pit and, with care, bring the young actress up to freedom. A bucket of water was retrieved from the kitchen, which Joanna used to wet her handkerchief and wash away much of the blood and grime that covered Pretty Penny’s face and arms.