The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors

by Edward B. Hanna

  Yes, that’s right, a long, dark coat with a fur collar.

  Abberline and Thicke, well versed in the art of questioning felons, took turns in questioning Hutchinson, and relentlessly tried every trick they knew to catch him up in the details. But it was no good. He stuck rigidly to his story, as preposterous as parts of it sounded, despite repeated efforts to break it down.

  Holmes listened to the entire performance without comment.

  “Worthless!” he said after the man had been taken out. “All quite worthless.”

  “Waaal,” said Thicke, “there’s parts o’ h’it, at least, what ‘ave a ring o’ truth.”

  “And larger parts,” scoffed Holmes, “that positively resonate with the dull thud of absurdity.”

  Poor Hutchinson was taken to the Leman Street station for continued questioning, and Abberline ordered the bar opened so they could avail themselves of some refreshment — a small restorative, as Thicke put it. He managed to down three of them in quick order.

  The police surgeon, Dr. Bagster-Phillips,98 joined them in the interim, and they spent the better part of the next thirty minutes reviewing his findings, which, not surprisingly, were sparse and as yet incomplete. Still, Holmes was impressed with the careful, systematic approach that the medical man took in gathering together the threads of his investigation. He was most thorough in his report, even though it was still a preliminary one.

  “Cause of death was the severance of the right carotid artery,” he said matter-of-factly, “inflicted while the victim was lying at the right side of her bedstead. In my opinion, the blade was wielded by a left-handed individual.”

  He swallowed down his whisky in a single gulp and grimaced. “Good Lord, is this dreadful stuff!”

  Dabbing at his lips with his handkerchief, he continued. “Perhaps I shall be able to tell you more after I examine her at the Shoreditch mortuary,” he said. “I have ordered the body taken there rather than to Montague Street, the facilities being far superior. But I believe I can state with a degree of certainty that death occurred between three-thirty and four A.M.”

  “That would be at around the time a neighbor said she heard a cry.”

  “Well, it would seem to fit, I think.”99

  “You have participated in the postmortems of a few of the earlier victims, I believe,” said Holmes. “Is it your opinion this murder was carried out by the same hand?”

  “Oh, yes. There can be no doubt. None whatsoever. The wounds to the throat by themselves tell the tale. And there is a definite similarity in the abdominal incisions, as well — in their location and the manner in which they were carried out.”

  “Ah, then, well, that settles it,” said Abberline.

  Holmes nodded, apparently satisfied. “Is there anything else you wish to call to our attention?” he then asked.

  “No, I think not. You have seen the body and the mess that has been made of it. What more could I possibly tell you? Oh. She was with child, if it matters.”

  He finished his whisky and with a nod was gone.

  Abberline studied his notebook thoughtfully for some minutes. “I have only this one remaining question on my list,” he said to Holmes finally. “As if the murders were not enough, the damnable fellow now leaves us with this new mystery to unravel.”

  “Oh?” said Holmes. “And what mystery would that be, Inspector?”

  “Why, the means of his exit from the premises. Surely you could not fail to notice that the inner bolt to the door was thrown. I saw you examining both the bolt and the lock on the door, so I know you noticed. It is a pretty little puzzle, is it not, how the killer managed to exit the premises given the fact that one of the windows was nailed shut and the other was too small for a man of average size to fit through?”

  Holmes raised an eyebrow. “I fail to see the puzzle in the matter. He walked through the door and then reached through the window — the one with the broken pane of glass — and merely threw the bolt. Surely you noticed that the bolt was in easy reach of the window.”

  Clearly Abberline had not.

  “And if you examine the lock on the door, I think you will find that it has been some time since a key has been inserted into it — several weeks, at least. There is an absence of fresh scratch marks, as one would expect to see on the surface of any lock whose key is invariably inserted in the dark by someone who is often the worse for drink. And there is even a slight tint of new rust in evidence around the keyhole. I expect you will learn upon investigating the matter that our Mistress Kelly misplaced her key and had gotten into the habit of using that conveniently located broken pane to work the inner bolt. Obviously the killer saw her do it and followed her example.”100

  Abberline quietly shut his notebook, noticeably embarrassed. “Yes. Of course,” he mumbled. Then he shook his head, whether in wonder or in self-disgust, it was impossible to know.

  “You do have a way of cutting mysteries down to size, Mr. Holmes. How very simple indeed you make it seem.”

  Holmes assumed an expression of perfect innocence. “Every mystery is simple once it is explained.”

  “Yes,” Abberline said with a heavy sigh. He stood up. “Well, that’s it, then. I should think we are finished here, unless you have something else, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Well, in actual fact,” replied Holmes, who had remained seated, “there is the small matter of the cigarette end with the gold tip.”

  Abberline was clearly taken aback. He gave Holmes the strangest look.

  “Mr. Holmes, there was no cigarette end! My men searched everywhere, and none was found.”

  Holmes looked very pleased with himself. “Precisely the point I wished to make, Inspector. Thank you so much indeed for making it for me.”

  Twenty-Four

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1888

  “The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis.”

  — Silver Blaze

  “What I do not understand,” said Watson as he and Holmes stepped out into the rain-slicked street, “is that on the one hand you seem to agree that this latest outrage was performed by the same individual who committed the earlier ones, yet on the other hand you continue to question whether it was indeed the same.”

  It had been raining off and on for the better part of the day and had just begun to rain lightly again. A mist was beginning to form, combining with the coal smoke that lay heavy over the city. Watson grappled with his umbrella as he fell into step alongside Holmes, who, taking no notice of the rain, set off down the street at a brisk pace. “I was merely commenting on the fact,” he said crisply, “that if it were the same killer, it is rather odd that none of his cigarettes had been found at the scene of the murder or anywhere in the vicinity.”

  “Well, I don’t know...” Watson mused. He gave a little laugh. “I don’t suppose it’s likely he gave up smoking?”

  Holmes made a derisive sound. “The trouble with a habit is that it is a habit. And the use of tobacco, as I have good reason to know, is a habit of the most formidable kind. I don’t believe he has stopped smoking any more than he has given up his other pernicious practice which, as we all have reason to know, he has not.”

  “Perhaps he disposed of them in the fireplace, then,” offered Watson.

  Holmes nodded. “That would indeed account for the lack of their presence in the room where the murder took place, and is my own presumption. Still...” His voice trailed off, his meaning clear.

  Leaving the Ten Bells public house behind them, they headed along a gray and cheerless Commercial Street in the general direction of the Spitalfields Market, which lay just a short distance ahead through the haze. In the early morning hours, when the market was at its busiest, the area was the scene of clangorous activity, but at this time of day it was typically almost empty of traffic, a bleak and dispirited place filled only with the litter and leavings of its commerce.

&n
bsp; Watson glanced around him and shivered. “Do you have a destination in mind?” he asked, hunching deeper into his coat. “This is hardly a desirable neighborhood for a constitutional, even if the weather were conducive to it.”

  The grimy tenements, which closed in upon them from both sides of the street, wore a mean and menacing look, and Watson felt distinctly ill at ease despite the presence now of uniformed constables at every corner.

  But if Holmes were in any way affected by the dismal surroundings or the weather, he did not show it. From his outward demeanor, one would have thought he was out walking in Regent’s Park on a fine spring day. “I thought we just might get the lay of the land whilst we are here,” he replied carelessly. But a keen glimmer in his eye belied his nonchalance. He was on to something; Watson could sense an undercurrent of excitement crackling just beneath the surface of that calm, imperturbable exterior.

  Watson peered at the buildings as they walked. Without him realizing it, they had retraced their steps and were once again in Dorset Street, just down from the entrance to Miller’s Court where the murder took place. The onset of the rain had effectively cleared the dark, narrow street ahead of them of most of the morbidly curious that had flocked to the scene once word of this latest murder had spread through the district. The last of the idlers had been chased away, the sidewalk hawkers had disappeared with the crowds, and the members of the press had rushed back to their offices to meet their deadlines. Now, except for one or two stragglers, the entire area was in almost the sole possession of a forlorn squad of constables from H-Division who, under their glistening oilskin capes, paced aimlessly up and down, singly and in pairs, stamping their feet against the chill.

  Holmes stopped and looked up and down the street. Then, casually, he walked over to an open iron grating set into the pavement near the curb and, bending over, peered down into it. The odor emanating from it was foul, but he took no notice of that; the smell of bad drains was a normal part of London life, and one became accustomed to it. Shaking his head, he straightened and without a word continued toward the corner, about one hundred yards farther on. There he came to another grating in the street. Once again he stopped to peer down. And once again he shook his head and resumed his walk, this time crossing over to the other side of the street, where a cast iron cover of another kind was set into the pavement. This was not an open grating like the others, but a solid oval plate about three feet in diameter.

  “Ah,” he said delightedly, “this just might be it.”

  Bending almost double, he pointed with his still-furled umbrella to some raised lettering cast into the center of the plate and surrounded by an ornate design. Watson had no difficulty making out the words, EAST LONDON RAILWAY was what it said.

  Holmes ignored the metal plate for the moment, concentrating his attentions on the pavement immediately surrounding it. Lowering himself on his haunches, he examined the paving blocks to one side of the cover with growing excitement. He rose to his full height with his nostrils flaring.

  “Here, Watson, give me a hand if you would.” So saying, he stooped down and grasped one of two recessed handles set into the edge of the iron cover. “Pray, lift straight up. Try not to scrape the street surface,” he instructed. Watson grasped the other handle and together they lifted. Despite its weight, it came up fairly easily, and they managed to shunt it over to one side without major difficulty.

  Crouching down, Holmes peered into the hole that was now exposed. A vertical brick-lined shaft was revealed, descending deep into darkness, the diameter of the shaft being just wide enough to accommodate a man. That it was intended to do just that was further suggested by a series of rusted iron rungs set one beneath the other into the brick wall of the shaft. They beckoned no invitation to Watson; instinctively, he took a step backward. One did not require an active imagination to conjure up all sorts of images of what horrid things might be lurking down there. He would no sooner descend into that hole than he would into a pit of vipers.

  Holmes, on the other hand, seemed delighted with his discovery. “What have we here?” he said, his eyes flashing.

  “Whatever do we have here?”

  A constable, curious to see what they were doing, came strolling up.

  “Here, my good man!” said Holmes. “I’ll have the loan of that bull’s-eye at your belt, if I may.”

  The constable, who knew a voice of authority when he heard one, handed the lantern over without question.

  “You’re not going down there, surely!” admonished Watson.

  “Oh, no, not I. Not at the moment, at least.” Holmes shone the light down the shaft until they could see to the bottom, which was not as far down as Watson had first thought, not more than twelve feet or so. It seemed to lead directly into a tunnel, which went off in two separate directions, following pretty much the same course as the street in which they were standing. Surprisingly, it was quite dry and clean down there — actually, from all appearances, a good deal cleaner than the street above. Watson had expected it to be a flowing sewer, a place where only rats would venture, rats and, on occasion, the filth-covered “toshers,” who made a precarious, odoriferous living scavenging underground for lost valuables.

  Holmes turned the light away from the bottom of the shaft and shone it onto the rungs of the ladder rising from it — on each of the rungs in turn until he was satisfied he had seen everything there was to see. What that could possibly be was a total mystery to Watson, for to his eye there was nothing down there. But obviously not to Holmes’s eye. It flashed with excitement as he straightened.

  Thrusting the lantern back into the policeman’s hands, Holmes grasped one of the handles of the iron cover and dragged it back into place, this time refusing Watson’s help. It took some little effort, but he was able to manage it on his own, and he seemed to achieve great satisfaction in doing so, for he smiled with satisfaction once he had wrestled the heavy cover into its former position. “Come, let us see what we can see farther on,” he said, wiping his hands on his handkerchief.

  Leaving the constable at the curb standing dumbly confused with arms akimbo, Holmes led the way back to the corner of Commercial Street and once again turned toward the giant Spitalfields Market with its row upon row of empty butcher stalls, devoid of activity at this late hour. As they approached the market, they became aware of a sickening, putrid smell in the air, the unmistakable cloying odor of rotting meat, which became stronger and stronger the closer they got until it became positively pervasive, predominating over the other smells of the area, the smells of human detritus, decay, and poverty, and even over the ever-present acrid stench of manure from the roadway, an odor so familiar to the nostrils throughout the entire city, even in the best of neighborhoods, as to be virtually unnoticeable except on those rare occasions when it was absent altogether.

  Once past the market, they found themselves at the corner of a street which to Watson’s eye looked vaguely, disturbingly familiar. He looked up to read the street marker affixed to the side of the corner building.

  “Why, we are in Hanbury Street!” he said, surprised. “Good Lord, Holmes, isn’t that the passage to where one of the earlier murders occurred?” He pointed to a doorway, number 29.

  “Indeed it is. That’s where the Chapman woman met her death in the early part of September.”

  “I didn’t know how close we were to it. Why, the two murder sites are only a few hundred yards apart!”

  “Exactly,” said Holmes. “And I think you will find that we are only a few minutes’ walk from the other three murder sites. Buck’s Row, where the first of the murders occurred, is over to our right. And Mitre Square, where the Eddowes woman met her death, is behind us.”

  “I hadn’t realized they were all so close to one another.”

  Holmes did not respond. He may not have heard him. He was standing in the gutter, peering down at yet another street grating. Without a word he reached down, grasped one of the recessed handles, and pulled up on it. “No, don
’t help. I want to be absolutely certain that I can manage it on my own.”

  He grunted with the effort, but he was able to do it. Lifting the heavy cast iron cover a scant inch or so — just high enough for one edge of it to clear the lip of the recessed iron rim fixed permanently in the pavement — he was then able to drag it to one side, far enough to clear the entrance to the shaft that descended below the level of the street. As before, iron rungs set into the bricks lining the sides of the shaft served as the means of climbing down into it.

  “Where do you suppose this goes, Holmes? Does it connect with the other one, perhaps? Is it some sort of underground passage, do you think?”

  “That is precisely what it is. And I do not think; I know! They do indeed connect.” Holmes straightened and peered first up the street and then down, his sharp, hawklike features appearing to actually lean with anticipation in the direction toward which he was looking.

  “Come! Help me with this thing!” Together they manhandled the iron plate back into its position, and Holmes, hot on the scent, took off down the street, Watson hard pressed to keep up with him.

  Within a few minutes they found themselves in Bishopsgate, a wide, heavily traveled thoroughfare that served as a boundary separating Spitalfields from the precincts of the City.

  The sky had darkened; visibility was dwindling. There would be a choking fog by nightfall for certain: One of those impenetrable, carboniferous “London particulars,” caused as much by smoke and soot from the railways and factory chimneys and from coal stoves in every kitchen and parlor in the city as by the heavy, saturated masses of air that drifted in as a matter of course from the sea, the two phenomena — one nature’s doing; the other, man’s — mixing together to form a noxious yellow-gray-brown sulfurous porridge that would soon descend upon the metropolis, as it did with disconcerting frequency, and simply smother it.

  The rain had become heavier, but Holmes continued to ignore it. Watson, who was forced to close his umbrella to keep pace with Holmes, could not help but take notice of it; he was getting soaked. The pair of them, he feared, would soon be sopping wet at this rate. “Holmes! For God’s sake, where are we bound?” His leg was beginning to ache and he was already panting with effort.