Holmes laughed outright. “All right, Wiggins, come in. But next time you must knock, and no excuses. Now, what have you to report?”
The boy sniffed loudly again. “H’its a foine pickle, Mr. ‘Olmes,” said Wiggins. “The ‘ole of Whitechap’l is in a panic, an’ ‘at’s no lie. Da streets is fairly buzzink w’iv da news of da murder. An’ da stories going about? Yer wouldn’t credit the ‘alf of ‘em, you wouldn’t.”
“I dare say. And what can you tell me that I would credit?”
Wiggins scratched the side of his head vigorously, causing Watson to hope that whatever was residing there did not become dislodged.
“Wh’ell, dere’s talk of a killer, a demon o’ some sort, stalkin’ da stweets w’iv a ‘atchet. Some sez ‘e’s a Jew w’iv a wild beard down ‘is chest, an’ some sez ‘ees a butcher fwom da slaughter’ouses w’iv a le’dder h’apron, an’ some sez ‘ees a toff fwom da West H’end out to kill all da ‘ores...”
“All the what?” queried Watson.
“Da ‘ores, da ‘ores — you know, da lydies o’ joy, da prost-ee-toots!”
“Oh.”
“Wh’ell h’anyw’ys, h’its h’imposs-ee-bul ta figg’r, dere’s so much, ah, so much, watcha-callit goin’ about.”
“Rumors?”
“Yeah, ‘ats h’it — roomers!”
“Well, Wiggins, let us see if we can separate rumors from fact, shall we?”
Wiggins scratched again, this time deep in the folds of his coat. “H’ide wyger h’its a Jew w’iv a ledd’r apron, t’ats me guess!”
Holmes waggled a finger. “We must not guess, Wiggins. What we need is hard information. Now, tell me, did you or any of the other lads find anyone who actually saw anything? Someone who, for example, may have run into this, this ‘Dark Annie’ person in the streets before she was murdered?”
Wiggins’s shrewd eyes narrowed and he nodded his head. “Wh’ell, I t’inks I did. ‘Ard to know, but I t’inks I did.”
Holmes leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, and the tips of his long, slender fingers came together in front of him.
“Tell me,” he said quietly.
The story that Wiggins now laid before them could, for all intents and purposes, have been given in code or some foreign tongue, for his cockney accent, heavily laced with the slang of the streets, required intense concentration to decipher, at least on the part of Watson, who more than once was tempted to stop him to get clarification. But he let the boy tell his story uninterrupted, knowing full well that Holmes, with his thorough knowledge of a wide range of regional accents and dialects (and his uncanny ability to mimic many of them), understood him if not always perfectly, at least adequately.
This, then, was Wiggins’s story:
As instructed by Holmes, he and his confederates spread themselves out among the public houses, soup kitchens, and other popular gathering places of Whitechapel, fading unobtrusively into the background to learn what they could. Following Holmes’s strict instructions to the letter, they refrained from asking questions outright, which might have called attention to themselves, but merely listened and observed. Then they regrouped to share what information they obtained: As luck would have it, it was Wiggins himself who came up with the most promising lead.
There was a man in one of the local pubs, The Britannia, in Fish Street Hill, who maintained he saw Dark Annie at around 5:30 that morning, shortly before her death. Wiggins was unable to learn the man’s full name, but several of the other patrons of the pub called him “Dick” or “Dicko.” Apparently he was a regular at the pub and was well known in the neighborhood. Wiggins said he seemed very upset over the killing because he knew Annie well and claimed to have been a friend of hers. As a result, he was somewhat the worse for drink, and his story was rambling and disjointed and not always completely coherent.
Dark Annie was not alone when this fellow, Dick, claimed to have seen her. She was with another man, a “mark” whom she had apparently just encountered in the street, for they appeared to be haggling over price as Dick approached. He said he overheard the man ask her, “Will you?” and she replied, “Yes.”
As he came closer to the pair, the man made an effort to hide his face, an act which called attention to himself all the more, resulting in Dick’s being somewhat more observant than he would have normally been. He was dressed as a gentleman, a “toff,” as Dick described him to his listeners in the pub. He wore a deerstalker, probably brown, and a long dark coat, and he carried a small satchel of some sort, made of shiny leather or a similar material. He was of average height and he had a mustache. The two words Dick heard him speak confirmed he was a gentleman because the words were spoken in a cultured, upper-class accent.
That was the sum total of Dick’s description of the man. Because of the poor light in the street, no more could be seen. And nothing more was heard. Dick continued on his way, and that was the last he saw of Annie Chapman.
Dick did say he passed another woman coming from the opposite direction at the very same time, and that she also would have seen the man Annie was with and could confirm the story, but Dick had never seen her before and didn’t know her name.22
Having completed his account, Wiggins stood quietly waiting for a reaction from Holmes, who said nothing at first but continued gazing up at the ceiling. Finally, he did speak:
“Describe the man again, exactly as you heard our friend Dicko tell it.”
“H’average ‘eyght, dressed like a toff, brown deerstalker ‘at — lyke I sees youse wear some-da-tyme — an’ a long cloak or coat, an’ ‘ee ‘ad a tickler and a —”
“A what?”
“A tickler — you know, a mustache.”
“Yes, of course.”
“An’ he carried sometin’ like a Gladstone bag, but mebbe smaller, like wot I seen da doctor ‘ere carry some-da-tyme.”
“A medical kit bag?”
“Aye, h’at’s ryght. Made out of ledder, mebbe, or ‘Merican cloth.’”23
“And this mustache, this, ah, tickler — he was quite certain about that?”
“Aye, h’at’s ryght.”
“What kind of mustache was it, did he say?”
“‘E said it wore a milit’ry mustache, but da lyght was bad an’ da bloke tried to ‘ide his face, an’ Dicko, ‘e din’t get a clear look. But it wore a milit’ry mustache, that much ‘e could tell.”
“Upturned or drooping?”
“Huh?”
“Was it turned up at the ends, or did it droop down?”
Wiggins rolled his eyes. “Luv a duck, guv, I don’ know.”
Holmes pulled at his chin and thought a minute. “He didn’t see the man’s eyes?”
“No, ‘e said ‘e din’t. ‘Is ‘at were pulled down.”
“And he saw nothing else?”
“Well, one t’ing. ‘Ee sez ‘e caught a flash of da bloke’s collar when ‘e turned lyke. It were funny, ‘e sez, ‘cause it were diff’rent.”
“Different? In what sense?”
“Well, ‘e sez it were a wery ‘igh collar, stretched out lyke.”
“Very high?”
“H’ats ryght. Lyke the kynd youse and the doctor ‘as on,” he said, pointing to the high starched collar that Holmes was wearing. “But unusua’wy ‘eigher, lyke ‘e ‘ad a wery long neck.”
Holmes mused over this point for several seconds before speaking again.
“There was nothing else?”
“Oh, one t’ing more. ‘E was smokin’, da bloke was. A lydy’s fag.”
“A cigarette?”
“Aye, ‘hat’s ryght.”
“And you say this encounter took place at the end of Dorset Street where it joins with Commercial Street?”
“Aye, ‘hat’s ryght.”
“Just one street away from Hanbury, where the murder occurred,” mused Holmes half to himself.
With this Wiggins reached into the folds of his coat and extracted something from an inner pocket, a small scrap o
f rolled newspaper twisted at the ends. Placing the makeshift little parcel onto the side table at Holmes’s elbow, he pulled it carefully apart with grimy fingers. Inside were several flattened cigarette butts, obviously picked up off the street.
“I went over dere to where ‘e said,” explained Higgins. “Me ‘n me myte, Burt. An’ we rummages ‘round a bit an’ found ‘em in da stweet. I t’ought ya myght lyke to ‘ave ‘em.”
Holmes clapped his hands delightedly and rose from his chair, laughing. “Wiggins, you are a treasure, an absolute treasure! If I had not already invented you, I would have to do so at once. You do me proud!”
Wiggins smiled with pleasure, blushing to his roots.
Holmes reached for his large magnifying glass and bent low over the cigarette ends, poking at them with a pencil. He arose within seconds, one of the butts held delicately between thumb and forefinger, a fierce gleam in his eye.
“Wiggins, m’ boy, you have accomplished in but a few hours what all of Scotland Yard has failed to do all day. You are deserving of nothing less than a knighthood!”
“Aw, go’awn,” said Wiggins, a crooked grin on his homely face. He pulled at his ear and shuffled from one foot to the other. Then something occurred to him and he frowned, and he looked at Holmes with grave suspicion.
“‘Ere! Do ‘at mean I don’ get me shillin’, then?”
Holmes and Watson were in a hansom bound for Scotland Yard within five minutes of Wiggins’s departure, somewhat more than a shilling gracing the young street arab’s voluminous pocket. The treasured cigarette butt, encased in a glassine envelope, was tucked safely into one of Holmes’s.
Holmes, who derived no small amount of personal satisfaction from the boy’s display of intelligence and initiative, was unsparing in his praise of the boy, whom he was beginning to look upon as a protégé, of sorts. “I tell you, Watson, he could go far with the right sort of education.”
Watson raised an eyebrow. “I should think a bath would do for starters.”
Holmes ignored the sarcasm. “There’s no doubt in my mind about it. Give a young chap like that some decent schooling and he could make his way in the world.”
Watson sniffed. “You’re talking rubbish, Holmes: Ineffable twaddle. The poor are poor because they’re deserving of nothing better. They could rise above their station if they wished. Indeed, some have done so successfully. But those who choose to live like animals do so only because they are animals. No amount of education is going to change that.”
Holmes cast him a sidelong glance and smiled thinly. “You have far too generous a heart to truly believe that, your Tory soul notwithstanding.”
“And you, I fear, are beginning to sound like one of those socialist fellows who are always stirring up so much trouble.”24
Holmes gazed out at the passing scene and shrugged. “Yes, well... even they cannot always be completely wrong.”
A light rain was beginning to fall as their hansom entered Piccadilly Circus, where early evening throngs promenaded past brightly lit theaters and shops, the lights reflecting garishly from the now-dampened pavement. When the hansom reached Trafalgar Square a few minutes later, the rain quite suddenly became heavier, causing the crowds there to quicken their pace, while a flock of pigeons erupted for no apparent reason from the base of Nelson’s Column, making a single circuit before settling helter-skelter amid the mushrooming of umbrellas that erupted almost as swiftly as the pigeons had taken flight.
Within minutes more the hansom carried them into Whitehall, taking them past darkened government buildings. The streets here, unlike the others they had driven through, were almost devoid of pedestrian traffic, for while most Londoners labored six and a half and seven days a week, government bureaucracy takes its weekends seriously, and except for a crisis of truly catastrophic proportions is to be found in evidence only Monday through Friday, holidays excepted. After rattling past Admiralty Arch, the hansom turned, and they now entered the narrow street, just opposite the Admiralty itself, that was their destination.
The collection of undistinguished low buildings of stone and grime-streaked yellow brick which now lay before them took its name from the street. Here resided the brain stem and central nervous system of the Metropolitan Police force and, of greater interest to Holmes at the moment, the offices of the Criminal Investigation Division. The whole and all of its parts — the street, the buildings, the police force, and the CID — were known both collectively and individually as Scotland Yard, a state of affairs which paradoxically was a source of never-ending confusion to anyone who was not a Londoner — a tribute, it seemed to Holmes, to that people’s indomitable tolerance of the absurd.
It was a thought that appealed to that small part of him which was French, and he left the carriage smiling, leaving Watson to wonder why.25
They entered the main building through a side entrance to avoid the crowd of journalists milling about in front. The latest murder being the major news story of the day, the presence of the journalists, a loud and raucous lot, was only to be expected, and Holmes, who generally held them and their work in low esteem, wished to avoid an encounter.
“It is the only profession I can think of that wholly consists of men who have missed their calling,” said Holmes dryly. “The best of them are assassins and lying malcontents; the worst are lazy assassins and lying malcontents. If truth were coin of the realm, they would all be paupers.”
It was only minutes after they gave their names to the officer at the desk that a tired and worried-looking Inspector Abberline came to fetch them, escorting them back to the rabbits’ warren of cluttered offices, drab and cheerless, that housed the CID.
Once he and Watson had been relieved of their hats and sticks and provided with mugs of tepid tea, Holmes lost no time in getting to the business at hand.
“This, I think, you will find of some interest,” Holmes said to Abberline, handing him the small glassine envelope. “It was discovered a short while ago at a location where the Chapman woman may have last been seen alive. It, in all probability, belonged to the man with whom she was seen, the very same man who may have accompanied her to number 29 Hanbury Street.”
Abberline took the envelope from Holmes’s fingers and, barely glancing at it, laid it on the desktop in front of him. “Thank you,” he said simply, his face showing no reaction whatsoever.
Holmes frowned, studying the other man’s features before speaking again.
“I must say, Inspector,” he said quietly, “that while a man in my profession should never be surprised at anything, I am at the moment surprised by your lack of surprise. Oh, I know it is not a crown jewel that I present to you, but it is an item of some value in the matter currently under investigation, and I would have thought you would have reacted with, shall I say, somewhat greater enthusiasm than you have so far exhibited.”
Abberline took a deep breath. “I have to inform you, Mr. Holmes, that our prime suspect is not the man your theory suggests. By that I mean he is not a gentleman, but a common laborer of the district. Sergeant Thicke is out looking for him now, and I hope to have him in custody before the day is out.”
Holmes placed a finger over his lips and leaned forward. “You not only surprise me, Inspector. You positively amaze me.”
Abberline fidgeted in his chair, and his fingers began a nervous tattoo on the desktop. Holmes observed him silently for a few moments, exchanged glances with Watson, and finally spoke again.
“Would it be presumptuous of me to ask who this suspect is, Inspector?” There was a slight edge to his voice.
Abberline refused to meet his gaze, but instead busied himself with a sheaf of papers in front of him. “Not at all,” he replied, his diffident tone suggesting otherwise. “It is a man by the name of John or Jack Pizer, who lives in the district and is believed to have been seen in the vicinity at around the same time the murder occurred.”
“And the fact of his being seen in the vicinity — believed to have been seen, in you
r words — that alone makes him the prime suspect? I should think that if he resides there, he quite possibly has legitimate business to be seen there.”
Abberline shook his head and looked up, meeting Holmes’s gaze finally. It apparently took some courage for him to do so. “He is known in the area as ‘Leather Apron.’ He habitually wears one, you see. He is a cobbler or boot finisher by trade.”
“Leather Apron,” mused Holmes, “Leather Apron. How very convenient.” The sarcasm in his voice, though gently expressed, was unmistakable, and Abberline visibly blanched.
Holmes continued. “I take it that the similar article of apparel that Inspector Chandler found at the murder scene and correctly deduced could have had nothing to do with the crime is what ties our Mr. Pizer to the event. Or am I only jumping to conclusions?”
Abberline sighed heavily. “Look, Mr. Holmes...” he began, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
Holmes jumped up from his chair and began pacing in front of Abberline’s desk. “Of course, of course, that must be it! How stupid of me for not realizing it sooner! For, after all, there cannot be another soul in all of London who also wears a leather apron: Not another cobbler, or butcher, or slaughterhouse worker, not a collier, or farrier or smithy, or hod carrier, not a surgeon or iron worker, or, or... I fear I am running out of occupations! Help me, someone!” He threw up his arms dramatically as if in entreaty and spun about. Then, leaning over the desk with anger in his eyes, he glared directly into Abberline’s face.
“Really, Inspector, this will not do! This will not do at all!”
Abberline looked miserable. Clearly, he could marshal no argument in the face of Holmes’s assertions, and made no effort to try. He clasped his hands together on the desk and held them tightly. Holmes stood there, exasperated, looking at him.
“Have you followed up on no other lead, then?” he asked quietly.
Abberline shook his head.
“That fragment of the envelope that was found near the body, bearing a regimental crest — the Sussex Regiment, I believe. Has any progress been made in tracking that down?”
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors Page 7
