The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors

by Edward B. Hanna

  “Steady on, Watson! Steady on! It’s not far, I promise you.”

  “What’s not far?” he gasped.

  Holmes pointed triumphantly. “There! There it is! What did I tell you?”

  Watson peered through the rain. “Why, it’s an underground railroad station,” he said incredulously.

  “Precisely!”

  From the extent of Holmes’s excitement, one would have expected it to be the ghostly ramparts of Camelot that was emerging from the mists in front of them. “For God’s sake, Holmes. What the devil is this all about? It’s merely an entrance to the tubes!”

  “It is the Bishopsgate station of the Metropolitan Railway, to be exact,” responded Holmes, “and that, dear chap, is how our friend Saucy Jack has managed to depart the area without being detected! It took Shinwell Johnson to put me onto it, for I was too stupid to figure it out on my own. Shinwell Johnson and Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall, if the full truth be known,” he added plaintively. “That befuddled old gentleman who delights in nonsensical quotations and has difficulty remembering that his spectacles are perched on his forehead.”

  It was over mugs of hot tea and a dish of penny Abernethys in the station’s small café that Holmes made his explanations. Abberline, summoned to join them, sat on the other side of the checkered oilcloth-covered table. Spread out between them was a large detailed diagram, a map of sorts, the seal of the Metropolitan Board of Works prominently displayed in the lower right-hand corner. Abberline had brought it with him, as Holmes’s hurried message had requested.

  “It cannot have escaped your attention,” said Holmes to Abberline, “that not only have all of the murders occurred within a few streets of one another, but all of the victims resided within a few streets of one another also. Indeed, there is a suggestion, I understand, that at least two of the women even knew each other. Maybe all of them did, for all we know; but that is conjecture.”

  Abberline’s eyes lit up. He saw the possibilities at once. “It is certainly a line of inquiry we can open at once. It should not be difficult to establish fairly quickly. If they all knew one another, or if even only two or three of them did, they will in all probability have had other acquaintances in common — male acquaintances, without doubt.”

  “Do conduct your inquiries by all means, Inspector,” Holmes replied. “I am certain your findings shall not be without interest. But for the moment I wish to direct your attention to a circumstance even more singular than the proximity of the, er, ladies’ domiciles.” He tapped the diagram spread out between them.

  “Do you see?” said Holmes, tracing his finger along a maze of varied-colored lines. “We are here, where Bishopsgate extends into Shoreditch and is bisected by Bethnal Green Road. This is Commercial Street down here, and just off it is Wheeler Street, here. Observe the intersecting lines? See how they all come together at this point? That is where we are presently sitting — or sitting above, to be more exact. What we are actually looking at is a street map of this area, only it is an underground street map showing the sewers and the various tunnels and passageways that run beneath the pavement. These are tunnels that service the underground railways and carry gas lines and water pipes and telegraph wires from one place to another. See? This is a gas line here, and these are water pipes. And these are the underground tunnels through which they pass.”

  Abberline spoke: “And these marks here, every other inch or so? They denote access from the street above, you say?”

  “Exactly. The Board of Works quaintly refers to them as ‘manholes.’ They’re positioned about one hundred yards apart. They are those round saucerlike metal plates we are beginning to see at almost every intersection nowadays: The things that make such a clatter when carriages drive over them, and in which ladies are forever catching the pointed heels of their ridiculous footwear.”

  Abberline set his mug down. “And I always thought those openings gave access to the sewers,” he mused.

  “No, not the ones shown here. Those are marked differently on the diagram, do you see? The metal plates that cover the holes leading down to the underground railway service tunnels are generally marked with the name of the rail system. See here? These belong to the inner circle line of the Metropolitan Railway, and these over here belong to the East London Line, which runs from Aldgate to connect over here with the Metropolitan and District lines. It is marked quite clearly. It is the new portion of the underground, opened just four years ago.101

  “And these tunnels are all connected, you say?” noted Abberline.

  “Connected and interconnected. There is an entire network beneath the streets, a veritable maze of tunnels. The main tunnels are quite wide and surprisingly dry and bright, due to the fact that vertical shafts carrying light and air from the roadways above are situated so close together. Even the branch tunnels are sufficiently large so that a man of normal height can comfortably traverse them without even having to bow his head, and they are astonishingly clean and free of vermin.”

  “And this is the way you think the Ripper has managed to evade us?” asked Abberline.

  “Without question.”

  Abberline looked dubious. “It strikes me as being — well, improbable, Mr. Holmes, if you will forgive me for saying so.”

  Holmes eyed him with a cold look. “Would you prefer to believe as others do that he simply vanishes ghostlike into thin air? Or ascends into the sky by the use of some sort of inflatable device, as a scientific chap of my acquaintance has suggested?” He raised his eyes heavenward. “It would seem that the manifestly impossible has a greater appeal to the imagination of most people than the merely improbable.” He took out a pencil and marked a series of small circles on the diagram. “At each of those positions you will find a manhole leading to an underground passageway. Please note the locations of them.”

  At Holmes’s bidding, Abberline bent over the diagram and read the locations off: “Hanbury Street... Dorset Street... Berner Street... Goulston Street... Buck’s Row — good Lord! Every one of them is a street where the Ripper has struck!”

  “Note the tunnel leading from Buck’s Row. Where does it go?”

  Abberline squinted his eyes and studied the diagram closely. “It runs for, oh, a scant two hundred yards or so toward Whitechapel Road. My God! It goes directly to the Whitechapel station of the underground!”

  “Now look at the mark I made near Mitre Square. Where does that tunnel lead?”

  Abberline leaned over the diagram again, his eyes inches from it. “To another station of the underground, the Aldgate station.”

  “Precisely. You will find in each case that the manhole entrances I have marked lead directly to underground stations. In some instances, my marks are quite close to the stations; in others, somewhat farther away. But never at a distance so great as to make it impractical, or even terribly difficult, for a determined man, armed with a map such as this, to reach the stations in short order.”

  Abberline pulled at his chin. “Well...” The dubious note he sounded was unmistakable.

  “Look, you here!” Holmes jammed his forefinger at a spot on the diagram. “See! Mark the position of this manhole — mark it well! It is located at the intersection of Dorset and Crispin Streets, just up from the entrance to Miller’s Court. Go back there and examine the paving blocks around it, if you will. You will note fresh scrape marks in the street where the cover was dragged across by a single individual — a left-handed individual, I might add — who desired access to the tunnel below but was unable to lift the cover completely clear of the manhole by himself.”

  Holmes noted the unspoken question in Abberline’s eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, man! The cover was dragged to the left of the hole as you face it from the curb! If he were right-handed, the scrape marks on the pavement would have been to the right of the hole!”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” said Abberline.

  Holmes resumed: “Now, should you lift the cover, you will find, on the top two or three rungs of the ladd
er leading down into the tunnel, fresh traces of a black and particularly viscous sample of muck. Unless I am very much mistaken, those traces will match with samples taken from the interior of Miller’s Court.”

  Abberline blew out his cheeks and he nodded silently, conviction appearing in his eyes at last.

  “And,” continued Holmes, “if that is not sufficient proof, take particular care when you reach the bottom of the shaft. There you will find, at the foot of the ladder, unless my eyes deceived me in the dim light, the flattened remains of a rather distinctive gold-tipped cigarette.”

  He could not help but smile slightly at the expression on Watson’s face. “You see? Our friend has not given up his pernicious habit, after all,” he said caustically.

  A long, heavy silence ensued. Abberline was the first to break it.

  “The... um... tunnel,” he said, peering down at the diagram. “This particular tunnel on the corner of Dorset Street? Where does it lead?”

  “Oh, no great mystery there,” replied Holmes. “It leads right here, to the underground station beneath our feet.”

  Abberline nodded knowingly. “That is what I expected you would say.” He pulled at his chin again, musing aloud. “But more to the point, where does the trail go from here? That’s the real question.”

  Holmes leaned back in his chair and lowered his gaze, a troubled, faraway look in his eyes. “Unfortunately,” he said, sighing deeply, “to tell you the truth of it, there is no great mystery there either.”

  He looked up. His eyes went from one to the other in turn. They were staring at him expectantly.

  He returned their look, his face innocently devoid of expression.

  Twenty-Five

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10-SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 1888

  “It is not too much to say that it is of such weight it may have an influence upon European history.”

  — A Scandal in Bohemia

  “Life,” Sherlock Holmes observed on one occasion, “is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”102 As a physician, decided Watson in a moment of quiet contemplation, as a physician he would heartily agree, but from the perspective of a writer, life left much to be desired. It had a tendency to disappoint. Fiction was far more reliable.

  Seldom did reality possess the neatness and dependability of fiction, its precise framework, its orderly structure, its predictable unpredictability, its carefully composed story line progressing step by methodical step toward that inevitable, ineluctable climax so essential to any plot. And that, as he perceived it, was the trouble with life. It was imperfect.

  “The public gets the wrong impressions from your accounts of my little problems, Watson,” Holmes once remarked. “You aim for the dramatic effect in your stories, yet in actuality there is little physical excitement to most of my investigations, as well you know. The science of detection depends largely upon one’s gray matter. Precious little flash to it, I can tell you. Usually what is involved is unrelieved tedium and dogged, painstaking researches. And, regrettably, there is seldom a smashing outcome, few of the thrills and rousing finales your editors dote upon. Far, far too seldom and far too few,” he added wistfully.

  He was right, of course. For one thing, life’s affairs all too often did not come to a conclusion, satisfactory or otherwise. They simply stopped — abruptly, artlessly, and without a shrug of apology. All too often there was no proper finish, no clear resolution or sense of finality, no ending at all; merely a cessation of activity. All too often there lacked that indispensable element of drama, that sense of wonderment, discovery, and surprise — those essential twists and delightfully serpentine turns leading inescapably to the neat and tidy ending the reader of fiction had come to expect.

  Was this, then, how the horror was to end? With no grand climax, no clash of cymbals, no startling discoveries or revelations?

  No. There were to be none of these things: No surprises. No dramatic confrontations. No scenes of satisfying retribution. The murders were to simply stop.

  Somewhere upon or beneath the mean streets of Spitalfields, in the early morning hours of November 9, 1888, the man known as Jack the Ripper disappeared forever. It was as if he had never existed, or, tiring of the game, merely chose to absent himself and move on to other things, other entertainments.

  But of course no one knew it at the time. No one realized then that Mary Jane Kelly was to be the last of his victims, that the persona of Jack the Ripper was no more. Some little time would have to pass before Londoners gratefully came to that realization and no longer started at every nighttime sound and shadow. But no time at all was required for them to launch and indulge in a wave of baseless, reasonless conjecture unequaled in its inventiveness and unparalleled in its scope. Gone he might be, this Ripper chap, but hardly — hardly — forgotten. He had already gained celebrity, achieved renown. Now he was to attain immortality. Now he was to enter the folklore, to acquire legendary status — even before the wreaths of rosemary were to wilt upon his last victim’s grave. For poor Mary Jane Kelly was laid to rest with much touching solicitude and at some expense, funds being quickly raised for the purpose from a suddenly generous, most sympathetic public, her leaving of this world having attracted far more attention and far more charity than her brief, sad, tawdry existence in it ever had, and her interment being far grander an occasion than anything she could have known in life or ever dreamt of attaining in afterlife.

  Throughout London, speculation was rife, the rumors rampant, the theories wild, varied, numerous, extravagant: All of positively epidemic proportions. Not too much to say that the name Jack the Ripper was on virtually every tongue, in every journal, on the lips of every shopkeeper, vendor, lord, and idler, of scullery maid, whore, and bejeweled dowager alike, of even the little children playing in the streets. In row house, tenement, town house, and palace, above stairs and below; in club room, tack room, dining room, and pub, his whereabouts, his fate, his identity, were the subject of conversation over practically every cup of tea, glass of port, or pint of bitters. But Holmes? — Holmes garbed himself in a cloak of stubborn silence, thin-lipped and obdurate, remaining steadfastly mute, refusing not only to express an opinion or share his thoughts, but to even listen to discussion of the matter or suffer casual allusions to it.

  Later, in retrospect, Watson, with the insights only the passage of time allows, would wonder privately what Holmes had known then, had known the very day of the Kelly murder and perhaps before, had possibly known all along, or at least very early on. Of course Watson could only speculate; he had nothing whatsoever to go on. But it was a safe bet, was it not? Did not Holmes always know more than he let on?

  Yes, of course he knew. He must have. But he chose not to reveal it, or, rather, chose to share his knowledge only with those whom he felt had to know along with him. Had to know.

  Clearly, Watson did not have to know.

  In the coming days, during that tense period when all of London lay in doubt and still very much in fear — still half expecting to awaken the next morning, or surely the one after, to new cries in the streets of “Murder! Horrible Murder! Another Murder in Whitechapel!” — a few carefully chosen individuals would be taken into his confidence, the absolute minimum number of those who had to be in possession of the knowledge. For if a conspiracy is to have any chance of success, it is always best to limit the number of conspirators. In this particular instance, given what was at stake, even two could be one too many.

  As Holmes once said on another occasion: “The only safe plotter is he who plots alone.”103

  The coroner’s inquest was held three days after Mary Jane Kelly’s body was found. Held in unseemly haste, some thought, and far too soon after the murder for all the facts of the case to have been ascertained or be readily available. In a departure from the usual practice, it was held outside the jurisdiction of the district where the death occurred — in Shoreditch as opposed to Whitechapel.104 The coroner for Shoreditch, a Dr. Roderick McDona
ld, was known to be sympathetic to the authorities, far more tractable than the man who had presided over the earlier inquests and had been so highly critical of police procedures and the authorities in general. Dr. McDonald proved to be an excellent choice, insofar as officialdom was concerned. His inquest was a hurried, slipshod affair. Witnesses and even members of the jury were hectored and browbeaten by him, and under his direction, evidence was suppressed, information withheld, testimony unheard, obvious questions unasked. The proceedings were brought to a conclusion after less than a day, the verdict arrived at without even bothering to obtain the victim’s name for the official record: “Willful murder against some person or persons unknown.”

  The press was outraged, and a cover-up broadly hinted at. Some newspapers called for an investigation, others for a new inquest altogether. But it was not to be. Mary Jane Kelly was hurriedly lowered into the ground, and the controversy over her inquest put to rest with her.

  This, of course, did not mean the business was over. The investigation was to go on. Scotland Yard and the Home Office, under pressure from the newspapers, were forced to reverse a long-standing policy and offer rewards for information, to be added to those already put up by various citizens’ groups. And the search for the killer continued. The streets and back alleys were scoured. Dozens of suspects were rounded up, questioned, and released. New theories were advanced and discarded. But of course the investigation went nowhere. It was not supposed to. The police were looking for someone who no longer existed.105

  In the months to come, other murders were to take place, murders which the press and public, and even some members of the police, quite naturally attributed to the Ripper, for they were similar in several respects to those that came earlier. But as is now known, and as Holmes no doubt then knew, they could not have been the work of the same hand, for Jack the Ripper was no more.