“As far as we can tell,” said Abberline, “it had no connection with the murderer. It was the woman’s apparently. She probably picked it out of a dustbin somewhere and used it to wrap some tablets in, some medication she picked up at the clinic. We’ve established she appeared there the previous day complaining of feeling ill.”
“Yes,” mused Holmes half to himself, “such an obvious clue would have been too easy.” He stroked his chin. “Nothing else, then?”
Abberline shook his head again.
“No effort has been made to search the streets for more of these cigarette samples? None of your men have attempted to question cabbies? Nothing has been done to seek out the man whose identity I described to you?”
With each question Abberline shook his head.
Holmes gazed at him silently for a long moment, then turned to retrieve his hat and stick. “Come, Watson. Our business here is done.”
Abberline rose from his desk and followed Holmes into the corridor, taking him by the arm as they walked toward the front hall. “Look, Mr. Holmes, I am not at all happy about this situation, that much must be obvious to you,” he said very quietly. “But as you no doubt are aware, our department has been under severe pressures of late. Surely you must realize that my hands are tied. I do have my orders, after all.”
Holmes nodded. “I assumed as much. I am not unaware of the stresses and recent changes that have been inflicted upon the CID.26 And I know what orders from a superior mean to a policeman. But what I cannot understand is the intellect of the superior who would give such orders. Upon what intelligence are these directives based? Upon what special knowledge or insight?”
Holmes reached out his hand, and in a small gesture of apology for his harsh words gently adjusted the collar of Abberline’s suit coat. “You need not attempt a reply, Inspector,” he said with a grim smile. “There can be no adequate response, and I expect none.”
They had reached the front hall and were just inside the vestibule at the door when the sound of an arriving carriage caught their attention. The door flew open and in walked a figure that caused their heads to turn.
It was a tall, good-looking man in the dress uniform of an army general — boots, spurs, medal ribbons and all. He had a full, drooping cavalry mustache and wore a monocle in his eye. Upon his head, incongruously, was a tall, old-fashioned stovepipe hat of the sort that police constables wore a generation past. The haughty bearing of the man, along with the uniform, the monocle, and the hat, resulted in a total effect so ludicrous that only a stage setting for one of Mr. Gilbert’s operatic farces would have done it justice.
Watson gasped and would have laughed outright had not something in Abberline’s demeanor — a look of apprehension, perhaps — brought him up short.
Abberline said deferentially, “Good evening, Sir Charles.”
“What’s this, what’s this?” said the general loudly, peering from face to face. “Oh, it’s you, Aberdeen. Carry on, then!”
He made as if to continue on his way, but stopped short and spun around on his heel. “And who are these gentlemen? Who are you, sir? And you? Who are you and what is your business here?”
The questions came in rapid-fire order and were delivered at something approaching parade-ground decibels, apparently his normal speaking voice. “From the Home Office, are you? I knew it! I can spot you bloody Home Office wallahs a mile away! Well, I won’t have you snooping around here with your striped trousers and effeminate ways! I won’t have it, d’ya hear! Don’t be bothering my officers with a lot of damn fool questions! They have better things to do with their time, or should, by gad!”
He spun on his heel again and once more started for the inner corridor, only to halt in mid-stride and return a second time. He pointed an accusing finger at Watson. “You are not Home Office! What do you mean by suggesting that? What are you, journalists? Too damn well turned out to be Fleet Street chaps, I should think! Seedy bunch of fellers, all of them. Who are these people, Aberdeen?”
Abberline, who had stood there stoically though all of this, swallowed hard. “May I introduce to you, Sir Charles, Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. Gentlemen, the Commissioner of Police, Sir Charles Warren.”27
“Holmes? Holmes?” bellowed Warren, making it sound like an accusation. “I thought you said Home Office!”
Holmes bowed slightly. “Actually, I said nothing at all, Sir Charles. But nonetheless, good evening to you.”
“Holmes!” bellowed Warren again, a spark of recognition appearing in his eyes. He lowered his head menacingly, his mustache quivering. “Not that so-called consulting detective feller, are you?”
Holmes smiled politely and bowed again.
Warren’s eyes blazed. “Well, I can tell you, sir, you are not wanted here! I have heard of you and your so-called scientific methods, and it is pure humbug, sir, that’s what it is — codswallop and humbug! Consulting detective, indeed!”
Warren approached within inches of Holmes and waved a finger under his nose. “It’s my aunt Fanny’s arse, that’s what it is! Now, what do you think of that?”
Holmes, who had little patience with those whom he deemed to have “less alert intelligences than his own” (It was people he did not suffer gladly; fools he suffered not at all), considered Warren coldly: “I think, Sir Charles, that you should uncock that finger, unless you intend to use it.”
Warren peered at him in confusion. “What! What! What did he say?” He turned to Abberline. “What’s he doing here anyway?
Abberline, who had visibly paled, searched his brain desperately for an adequate reply, for his career, he realized, was suddenly in great jeopardy. He had gone to Holmes on his own initiative, without the knowledge or consent of higher authority. He had violated the old adage among civil servants: “That which is not expressly permitted is expressly forbidden.” He had committed an unpardonable sin, and what was worse, he had done it stupidly: He not only acted on his own but acted without having anyone to lay the blame on.
Abberline’s predicament became clear to Holmes in an instant. He jumped in quickly. “My presence here, Sir Charles, has to do with the Whitechapel business. I have been following developments closely and have some theories about the case that Inspector Abberline reluctantly — though I must say, politely — agreed to listen to.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” Warren said. He cast an angry glance in Abberline’s direction.
“Yes. But the inspector was not interested in my views, and I realize now that I was wasting his time.” Holmes waved an angry Watson to silence, for he had opened his mouth to protest. “So, with your permission, sir,” Holmes continued, “Dr. Watson and I will now take our leave.”
Warren nodded. “You do that! And let me tell you, sir, that I concur wholeheartedly with my officer! He acted quite correctly, quite correctly indeed. This is no business for amateurs, and certainly no business of yours, and I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of it. And one thing more, sir. Should you ever meddle in police business again, I shall have you taken in charge. Taken in charge, sir! Count on it!”
With that he turned away a final time and marched briskly down the corridor, calling over his shoulder, “Good show, Aberdeen! Jolly good show!”
Holmes smiled grimly, only the touch of color in his cheeks and the tightening of his jaw revealing his true feelings; Watson stood there sputtering with rage while Abberline, a very pale and visibly shaken Abberline, cast his eyes heavenward and breathed an audible sigh of relief.
“Come, Watson,” said Holmes, “I think a visit to Clarences would do us both a world of good, and then perhaps a soothing steam at Faulkners, if that meets with your approval. What say you, eh?”28
Waving Abberline’s effusive thanks and apologies aside, Holmes took a protesting Watson by the arm and proceeded out the door.
Thus their ignominious departure from Scotland Yard.
Seven
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9-TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1888
; “I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”
— The Sign of the Four
The day that followed Sherlock Holmes’s visit to Scotland Yard was to be a difficult one for him and an anxious one for Watson. Despite Holmes’s outward display of indifference, he was naturally upset by Sir Charles Warren’s contemptuous treatment, and Watson knew him well enough to see the signs: He was totally uncommunicative at breakfast and unusually subdued, and he barely touched the food on his plate. It was abundantly obvious he was in one of his melancholy moods, listless, moody, despondent. Certainly, he could hardly be blamed.
After all, hadn’t he rendered invaluable assistance to Scotland Yard on several occasions in the past? And hadn’t he always enjoyed a cordial if sometimes prickly relationship with the police officials with whom he had come into contact? Never had he been treated so shabbily and so rudely by any of them. Never had he been ordered off the premises of the Yard like a poacher, a common trespasser on someone’s land. Or ordered off a case under investigation, for that matter. And rarely had his ego — his so tender ego — been so badly bruised.
The day being Sunday, and a damp, dismally gray one at that, the two of them stayed indoors in front of the fire, content to while away the hours in the homey clutter of their sitting room with the newspapers and their respective books and journals to keep them occupied. More than once Watson cast an anxious glance in Holmes’s direction, half expecting at any time to see his arm reach out for the little bottle on the corner of the mantelpiece, for the syringe in its neat morocco case. For in those years Sherlock Holmes’s customary solution to inactivity and depression was almost always his “seven percent solution.”
But he refrained, much to Watson’s relief. Indeed, his mood was such, his manner so lethargic, it was almost as if he hadn’t had the energy for even that. To his credit, he did his best to hide his true feelings behind a mask of imperturbability, even from Watson — particularly from Watson — for he knew his friend was upset for his sake. But of course it didn’t work. Watson saw through him in a minute. Unlike Holmes, he gave vent to his emotions and was visibly outraged by Warren’s behavior.
“The man’s an ass, Holmes!” he argued in an effort to cheer up his friend. “You must consider the source!”
Holmes merely nodded and did his best to smile, but it was a thin, rueful smile tinged, understandably, with more than a touch of bitterness. And it was obviously rendered more for Watson’s benefit than out of conviction.
“Man despises what he does not comprehend,” Watson quoted, but even Goethe’s wisdom encountered an unreceptive mind. Holmes’s response was an apathetic shrug and another feeble nod.29
The subject was dropped, Watson not wishing to belabor the point and Holmes not wishing to discuss it at all.
Watson knew that even more than the insult to Holmes’s pride, more than the damage to his self-esteem, it was the sudden lack of activity that put him into his present state of depression. He could withstand almost any deprivation, almost any insult — he could go for days without food and even sleep; but he could not go without mental stimulation. He lived for the sudden trample of footsteps on the stairs, the unexpected knock at the door. He lived for the chase; his sole passion was the game, always the game.
And now? Now, for the moment at least, there was nothing. Now there was an emptiness. There was no mystery to solve, no puzzle to unravel. His life was devoid of challenge and was therefore barren. And he, therefore, was miserable.
“My mind rebels at stagnation,” he once said. “Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.”30
So naturally, given Holmes’s mood, Watson was more than a little surprised (and greatly relieved) when at day’s end the bottle still remained on the shelf and the syringe in its case, and not for the first time did he marvel over the one facet of Holmes’s personality that was totally predictable: his unpredictability.
They both retired early that night, after a light supper: It was a day that was best done with quickly.
Fortunately, the days and weeks that followed were to be better ones for the lodgers of 221B Baker Street. Holmes’s plea for activity, for work, happily was to receive a quick response. He was to become involved in two of the most important cases of his career (along with one or two less so), was to encounter the notorious Jonathan Small, and do battle with the “hound of hell” at Baskerville Hall; and, with a mixture of amusement, pity, and sadness, was to see Watson fall hopelessly, deeply in love — with a woman whom even Holmes, with all of his expressed disinterest in the fair sex, admitted was “one of the most charming young ladies I have ever met.”31
During all of this time, Scotland Yard’s investigation of the two Whitechapel murders was to run its course — and a short, bumpy course it proved to be.
The newspapers were full of it. They made much of the fact that not only was there no motive but there was no real suspect, and frantic efforts on the part of the police were leading nowhere. For a while the attentions of the police inquiry, as Abberline had revealed, focused on a thirty-three-year-old Polish Jew by the name of John Pizer, the man known in the district as Leather Apron. Early on the morning of Monday the 10th, Pizer was traced to a house in Mulberry Street, where he was duly arrested by Sergeant Thicke and taken in for questioning.
The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial and tenuous at best: The presence of the leather apron in the courtyard behind 29 Hanbury Street; the fact that he had a “reputation” for ill-treating prostitutes; the fact that he was seen wearing a deerstalker hat similar to the one worn by Annie Chapman’s killer; and the added fact that Chapman’s lodging-house keeper told a Press Association reporter that he had ejected Pizer from the lodging house a few months earlier for attacking, or threatening to attack (he was somewhat vague on the point), one of the female lodgers.
The police were convinced they had their man.
A broadsheet hawked in the streets gave these details:
At nine o’clock this morning Detective Sergeant William Thicke, H-Division, who has had charge of this case, succeeded in capturing the man known as Leather Apron.
There is no doubt that he is the murderer, for a large number of long-bladed knives was found in his possession.
Thicke was the man of the hour. Adding to the neatness of his case was the “evidence” found in Pizer’s room in Mulberry Street, described variously by the press as “long-bladed” knives and “long-handled” knives. The “large number” turned out to be five. They proved to be boot-finisher’s knives, and the reason they were in Pizer’s possession was soon established: Pizer by trade was a boot finisher.
He was taken to the Leman Street police station, accompanied voluntarily by the friends with whom he had been lodging. He and they protested his innocence, insisting he had not been out of the house since the previous Thursday.
Pizer’s arrest had immediate repercussions for the sizable population of Jewish immigrants living in Whitechapel. Within hours, scores of unfortunate Jews were harassed and beaten in the streets in a wave of almost spontaneous anti-Semitism. Commented The Daily News: “There may soon be murders from panic to add to murders from lust for blood...”
That same afternoon another arrest was made, that of one William Piggott, who bore a resemblance to Pizer. He was spotted drinking in a pub in Gravesend, wearing bloodstained clothing and boots and was found to be carrying a bundle of shirts that were also stained with blood. When questioned, Piggott proved to be a willing witness, albeit sometimes incoherent, and sometimes all too willing: He willingly admitted he had been in Whitechapel the Saturday morning in question. He willingly admitted he had walked down Brick Lane and had gotten into an altercation with a prostitute. He willingly admitted he had struck her. As for the bloodstained clothing, he had no rational explanation, but seemed willing to admit to any explanation at all. The problem was that none
of the police witnesses (or all-too-cooperative individuals who made claim to being witnesses) could identify Piggott, and after a few hours in cells his speech and behavior became so strange and erratic that a physician was summoned. The physician took one look at him and declared him insane.
For several hours suspicion was focused on yet a third man, a market porter by the name of John Richardson, whose mother rented the ground floor of 29 Hanbury Street as well as the yard in the rear and a workshop off the yard. It was soon determined that it was his leather apron that had been found in the yard. He freely admitted it. He customarily wore it when working in the cellar, he said, and it had been in the yard since Thursday. His mother confirmed it: She had washed it on Thursday and left it on the fence to dry, she said.
Richardson was released. Pizer was released. Piggott was sent to the asylum in Bow. The police had nothing and no one, and the press made much of it.
Hundreds more arrests were to be made — anyone and everyone seemed to be suspect. They were to include Irishmen, Germans, Poles, Jews, stockbrokers, seamen, butchers. They were brought in for the flimsiest of reasons, and often for no reason at all. Said The Times: “It seems at times as if every person in the streets were suspicious of everyone else he met, and as if it were a race between them who could first inform against his neighbor.” And dozens of people, women as well as men, walked in off the streets inexplicably proclaiming their guilt. But the police were to be frustrated at every turn. Few individuals were held for more than an hour or two. There was not a shred of evidence or a single clue to act upon.
Punch, critical of the police for acting on spurious information, published a cartoon showing a blindfolded police constable being spun around by a group of leering criminals. “Blind Man’s Buff’ was the caption.
The tenor of the times was such, the fear in the streets so great, that a drunken prankster could empty out a saloon by merely claiming he had the murder knife in his pocket. An Irishman by the name of John Brennan made such a pronouncement and quickly found himself to be in sole possession of the White Hart pub in Camberwell. How many drinks he helped himself to before the police arrived was not recorded.
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors Page 8
