The Big Book of Jack the Ripper

by The Big Book of Jack the Ripper (retail) (epub)

  “Wanted

  “A man, of age approximately 28, slight in figure, height approximately 5 ft. 8 in. Complexion dark. No beard or whiskers. Wearing a black diagonal coat, hard felt hat, high white collar, and tie. Carried a newspaper parcel. Very respectable appearance.”

  Mrs. Bunting walked forward. She gave a long, fluttering sigh of unutterable relief.

  “There’s the chap!” said Joe Chandler triumphantly. “And now, Miss Daisy”—he turned to her jokingly, but there was a funny little tremor in his frank, cheerful-sounding voice—“if you knows of any nice, likely young fellow that answers to that description—well, you’ve only got to walk in and earn your reward of five hundred pounds.”

  “Five hundred pounds!” cried Daisy and her father simultaneously.

  “Yes. That’s what the Lord Mayor offered yesterday. Some private bloke—nothing official about it. But we of the Yard is barred from taking that reward, worse luck. And it’s too bad, for we has all the trouble, after all!”

  “Just hand that bit of paper over, will you?” said Bunting. “I’d like to con it over to myself.”

  Chandler threw over the bit of flimsy.

  A moment later Bunting looked up and handed it back. “Well, it’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And there’s hundreds—nay, thousands—of young fellows that might be a description of,” said Chandler sarcastically. “As a pal of mine said this morning, ‘There isn’t a chap will like to carry a newspaper parcel after this.’ And it won’t do to have a respectable appearance—eh?”

  Daisy’s voice rang out in merry, pealing laughter. She greatly appreciated Mr. Chandler’s witticism.

  “Why on earth didn’t the people who saw him try and catch him?” asked Bunting suddenly.

  And Mrs. Bunting broke in, in a lower voice, “Yes, Joe—that seems odd, don’t it?”

  Joe Chandler coughed. “Well, it’s this way,” he said. “No one person did see all that. The man who’s described here is just made up from the description of two different folk who think they saw him. You see, the murders must have taken place—well, now, let me see—perhaps at two o’clock this last time. Two o’clock—that’s the idea. Well, at such a time as that not many people are about, especially on a foggy night. Yes, one woman declares she saw a young chap walking away from the spot where ’twas done; and another one—but that was a good bit later—says The Avenger passed by her. It’s mostly her they’re following in this ’ere description. And then the boss who has charge of that sort of thing looked up what other people had said—I mean when the other crimes was committed. That’s how he made up this ‘Wanted.’ ”

  “Then The Avenger may be quite a different sort of man?” said Bunting slowly, disappointedly.

  “Well, of course he may be. But, no; I think that description fits him all right,” said Chandler; but he also spoke in a hesitating voice.

  “You was saying, Joe, that they found a weapon?” observed Bunting insinuatingly.

  He was glad that Ellen allowed the discussion to go on—in fact, that she even seemed to take an intelligent interest in it. She had come up close to them, and now looked quite her old self again.

  “Yes. They believe they’ve found the weapon what he does his awful deeds with,” said Chandler. “At any rate, within a hundred yards of that little dark passage where they found the bodies—one at each end, that was—there was discovered this morning a very peculiar kind o’ knife—‘keen as a razor, pointed as a dagger’—that’s the exact words the boss used when he was describing it to a lot of us. He seemed to think a lot more of that clue than of the other—I mean than of the description people gave of the chap who walked quickly by with a newspaper parcel. But now there’s a pretty job in front of us. Every shop where they sell or might a’ sold, such a thing as that knife, including every eating-house in the East End, has got to be called at!”

  “Whatever for?” asked Daisy.

  “Why, with an idea of finding out if anyone saw such a knife fooling about there any time, and, if so, in whose possession it was at the time. But, Mr. Bunting”—Chandler’s voice changed; it became businesslike, official—“they’re not going to say anything about that—not in the newspapers—till to-morrow, so don’t you go and tell anybody. You see, we don’t want to frighten the fellow off. If he knew they’d got his knife—well, he might just make himself scarce, and they don’t want that! If it’s discovered that any knife of that kind was sold, say a month ago, to some customer whose ways are known, then—then——”

  “What’ll happen then?” said Mrs. Bunting, coming nearer.

  “Well, then, nothing’ll be put about it in the papers at all,” said Chandler deliberately. “The only objec’ of letting the public know about it would be if nothink was found—I mean if the search of the shops, and so on, was no good. Then, of course, we must try and find out someone—some private person-like, who’s watched that knife in the criminal’s possession. It’s there the reward—the five hundred pounds will come in.”

  “Oh, I’d give anything to see that knife!” exclaimed Daisy, clasping her hands together.

  “You cruel, bloodthirsty girl!” cried her stepmother passionately.

  They all looked round at her, surprised.

  “Come, come, Ellen!” said Bunting reprovingly.

  “Well, it is a horrible idea!” said his wife sullenly. “To go and sell a fellow-being for five hundred pounds.”

  But Daisy was offended. “Of course I’d like to see it!” she cried defiantly. “I never said nothing about the reward. That was Mr. Chandler said that! I only said I’d like to see the knife.”

  Chandler looked at her soothingly. “Well, the day may come when you will see it,” he said slowly.

  A great idea had come into his mind.

  “No! What makes you think that?”

  “If they catches him, and if you comes along with me to see our Black Museum at the Yard, you’ll certainly see the knife, Miss Daisy. They keeps all them kind of things there. So if, as I say, this weapon should lead to the conviction of The Avenger—well, then, that knife ’ull be there, and you’ll see it!”

  “The Black Museum? Why, whatever do they have a museum in your place for?” asked Daisy wonderingly. “I thought there was only the British Museum——”

  And then even Mrs. Bunting, as well as Bunting and Chandler, laughed aloud.

  “You are a goosey girl!” said her father fondly. “Why, there’s a lot of museums in London; the town’s thick with ’em. Ask Ellen there. She and me used to go to them kind of places when we was courting—if the weather was bad.”

  “But our museum’s the one that would interest Miss Daisy,” broke in Chandler eagerly. “It’s a regular Chamber of ’Orrors!”

  “Why, Joe, you never told us about that place before,” said Bunting excitedly. “D’you really mean that there’s a museum where they keeps all sorts of things connected with crimes? Things like knives murders have been committed with?”

  “Knives?” cried Joe, pleased at having become the centre of attention, for Daisy had also fixed her blue eyes on him, and even Mrs. Bunting looked at him expectantly. “Much more than knives, Mr. Bunting! Why, they’ve got there, in little bottles, the real poison what people have been done away with.”

  “And can you go there whenever you like?” asked Daisy wonderingly. She had not realised before what extraordinary and agreeable privileges are attached to the position of a detective member of the London Police Force.

  “Well, I suppose I could——” Joe smiled. “Anyway I can certainly get leave to take a friend there.” He looked meaningly at Daisy, and Daisy looked eagerly at him.

  But would Ellen ever let her go out by herself with Mr. Chandler? Ellen was so prim, so—so irritatingly proper. But what was this father was saying? “D’you really mean that, Joe?”

  “Yes, o’ course I do!”

  “Well, then, look here! If it isn’t asking too much of a favour, I should lik
e to go along there with you very much one day. I don’t want to wait till The Avenger’s caught”—Bunting smiled broadly. “I’d be quite content as it is with what there is in that museum o’ yours. Ellen, there”—he looked across at his wife—“don’t agree with me about such things. Yet I don’t think I’m a bloodthirsty man! But I’m just terribly interested in all that sort of thing—always have been. I used to positively envy the butler in that Balham Mystery!”

  Again a look passed between Daisy and the young man—it was a look which contained and carried a great many things backwards and forwards, such as—“Now, isn’t it funny that your father should want to go to such a place? But still, I can’t help it if he does want to go, so we must put up with his company, though it would have been much nicer for us to go just by our two selves.” And then Daisy’s look answered quite as plainly, though perhaps Joe didn’t read her glance quite as clearly as she had read his: “Yes, it is tiresome. But father means well; and ’twill be very pleasant going there, even if he does come too.”

  “Well, what d’you say to the day after to-morrow, Mr. Bunting? I’d call for you here about—shall we say half-past two?—and just take you and Miss Daisy down to the Yard. ’Twouldn’t take very long; we could go all the way by bus, right down to Westminster Bridge.” He looked round at his hostess: “Wouldn’t you join us, Mrs. Bunting? ’Tis truly a wonderful interesting place.”

  But his hostess shook her head decidedly. “ ’Twould turn me sick,” she exclaimed, “to see the bottle of poison what had done away with the life of some poor creature! And as for knives——!” A look of real horror, of startled fear, crept over her pale face.

  “There, there!” said Bunting hastily. “Live and let live—that’s what I always say. Ellen ain’t on in this turn. She can just stay at home and mind the cat,—I beg his pardon, I mean the lodger!”

  “I won’t have Mr. Sleuth laughed at,” said Mrs. Bunting darkly. “But there! I’m sure it’s very kind of you, Joe, to think of giving Bunting and Daisy such a rare treat”—she spoke sarcastically, but none of the three who heard her understood that.

  CHAPTER IX

  The moment she passed through the great arched door which admits the stranger to that portion of New Scotland Yard where throbs the heart of that great organism which fights the forces of civilised crime, Daisy Bunting felt that she had indeed become free of the Kingdom of Romance. Even the lift in which the three of them were whirled up to one of the upper floors of the huge building was to the girl a new and delightful experience. Daisy had always lived a simple, quiet life in the little country town where dwelt Old Aunt, and this was the first time a lift had come her way.

  With a touch of personal pride in the vast building, Joe Chandler marched his friends down a wide, airy corridor.

  Daisy clung to her father’s arm, a little bewildered, a little oppressed by her good fortune. Her happy young voice was stilled by the awe she felt at the wonderful place where she found herself, and by the glimpses she caught of great rooms full of busy, silent men engaged in unravelling—or so she supposed—the mysteries of crime.

  They were passing a half-open door when Chandler suddenly stopped short. “Look in there,” he said, in a low voice, addressing the father rather than the daughter, “that’s the Finger-Print Room. We’ve records here of over two hundred thousand men’s and women’s finger-tips! I expect you know, Mr. Bunting, as how, once we’ve got the print of a man’s five finger-tips, well, he’s done for—if he ever does anything else, that is. Once we’ve got that bit of him registered he can’t never escape us—no, not if he tries ever so. But though there’s nigh on a quarter of a million records in there, yet it don’t take—well, not half an hour, for them to tell whether any particular man has ever been convicted before! Wonderful thought, ain’t it?”

  “Wonderful!” said Bunting, drawing a deep breath. And then a troubled look came over his stolid face. “Wonderful, but also a very fearful thought for the poor wretches as has got their finger-prints in there, Joe.”

  Joe laughed. “Agreed!” he said. “And the cleverer ones knows that only too well. Why, not long ago, one man who knew his record was here safe, managed to slash about his fingers something awful, just so as to make a blurred impression—you takes my meaning? But there, at the end of six weeks the skin grew all right again, and in exactly the same little creases as before!”

  “Poor devil!” said Bunting under his breath, and a cloud even came over Daisy’s bright, eager face.

  They were now going along a narrower passage, and then again they came to a half-open door, leading into a room far smaller than that of the Finger-Print Identification Room.

  “If you’ll glance in there,” said Joe briefly, “you’ll see how we finds out all about any man whose finger-tips has given him away, so to speak. It’s here we keeps an account of what he’s done, his previous convictions, and so on. His finger-tips are where I told you, and his record in there—just connected by a number.”

  “Wonderful!” said Bunting, drawing in his breath.

  But Daisy was longing to get on—to get to the Black Museum. All this that Joe and her father were saying was quite unreal to her, and, for the matter of that, not worth taking the trouble to understand. However, she had not long to wait.

  A broad-shouldered, pleasant-looking young fellow, who seemed on very friendly terms with Joe Chandler, came forward suddenly, and, unlocking a commonplace-looking door, ushered the little party of three through into the Black Museum.

  For a moment there came across Daisy a feeling of keen disappointment and surprise. This big, light room simply reminded her of what they called the Science Room in the public library of the town where she lived with Old Aunt. Here, as there, the centre was taken up with plain glass cases fixed at a height from the floor which enabled their contents to be looked at closely.

  She walked forward and peered into the case nearest the door. The exhibits shown there were mostly small, shabby-looking little things, the sort of things one might turn out of an old rubbish cupboard in an untidy house—old medicine bottles, a soiled neckerchief, what looked like a child’s broken lantern, even a box of pills….

  As for the walls, they were covered with the queerest-looking objects; bits of old iron, odd-looking things made of wood and leather, and so on.

  It was really rather disappointing.

  Then Daisy Bunting gradually became aware that, standing on a shelf just below the first of the broad, spacious windows which made the great room look so light and shadowless, was a row of life-size white plaster heads, each head slightly inclined to the right. There were about a dozen of these, not more—and they had such odd, staring, helpless, real-looking faces.

  “Whatever’s those?” asked Bunting in a low voice.

  Daisy clung a thought closer to her father’s arm. Even she guessed that these strange, pathetic, staring faces were the death-masks of those men and women who had fulfilled the awful law which ordains that the murderer shall be, in his turn, done to death.

  “All hanged!” said the guardian of the Black Museum briefly. “Casts taken after death.”

  Bunting smiled nervously. “They don’t look dead somehow. They looks more as if they were listening,” he said.

  “That’s the fault of Jack Ketch,” said the man facetiously. “It’s his idea—that of knotting his patient’s necktie under the left ear! That’s what he does to each of the gentlemen to whom he has to act valet on just one occasion only. It makes them lean just a bit to one side. You look here——?”

  Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the speaker pointed with his finger to a little dent imprinted on the left side of each neck; running from this indentation was a curious little furrow, well ridged above, showing how tightly Jack Ketch’s necktie had been drawn when its wearer was hurried through the gates of eternity.

  “They looks foolish-like, rather than terrified, or—or hurt,” said Bunting wonderingly.

  He was extr
aordinarily moved and fascinated by those dumb, staring faces.

  But young Chandler exclaimed in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, “Well, a man would look foolish at such a time as that, with all his plans brought to naught—and knowing he’s only got a second to live—now wouldn’t he?”

  “Yes, I suppose he would,” said Bunting slowly.

  Daisy had gone a little pale. The sinister, breathless atmosphere of the place was beginning to tell on her. She now began to understand that the shabby little objects lying there in the glass case close to her were each and all links in the chain of evidence which, in almost every case, had brought some guilty man or woman to the gallows.

  “We had a yellow gentleman here the other day,” observed the guardian suddenly; “one of those Brahmins—so they calls themselves. Well, you’d ’a been quite surprised to see how that heathen took on! He declared—what was the word he used?”—he turned to Chandler.

  “He said that each of these things, with the exception of the casts, mind you—queer to say, he left them out—exuded evil, that was the word he used! Exuded—squeezed out it means. He said that being here made him feel very bad. And ’twasn’t all nonsense either. He turned quite green under his yellow skin, and we had to shove him out quick. He didn’t feel better till he’d got right to the other end of the passage!”

  “There now! Who’d ever think of that?” said Bunting. “I should say that man ’ud got something on his conscience, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I needn’t stay now,” said Joe’s good-natured friend. “You show your friends round, Chandler. You knows the place nearly as well as I do, don’t you?”

  He smiled at Joe’s visitors, as if to say good-bye, but it seemed that he could not tear himself away after all.

  “Look here,” he said to Bunting. “In this here little case are the tools of Charles Peace. I expect you’ve heard of him.”

  “I should think I have!” cried Bunting eagerly.

  “Many gents as comes here thinks this case the most interesting of all. Peace was such a wonderful man! A great inventor they say he would have been, had he been put in the way of it. Here’s his ladder; you see it folds up quite compactly, and makes a nice little bundle—just like a bundle of old sticks any man might have been seen carrying about London in those days without attracting any attention. Why, it probably helped him to look like an honest working man time and time again, for on being arrested he declared most solemnly he’d always carried that ladder openly under his arm.”