by Jill Jones
“For a Sherlock fan like me,” she murmured, “this is the mother lode.” After studying the replica for several minutes, she turned her attention to the souvenir display. “I need to take something back for Mike,” she said, holding up a T-shirt. Then she spotted the most adorable teddy bear she’d ever seen. “Oh, look,” she cried, picking it up. He was garbed in full Sherlock regalia—cape, deerstalker and pipe. “I have to have one of those,” she told Jonathan. “Let’s eat first, and I’ll come back for my goodies.”
The young man who seated them explained that the Sherlock Holmes exhibit was purchased by Whitbread and Company from a special exhibit in 1957, and subsequently displayed here on the premises that used to be the Northumberland Arms. “If you’re familiar with the work of Conan Doyle, you’ll recognize the Northumberland as the place where Sir Henry Baskerville stayed on his visit to London.” He pointed out the mounted head of a fierce creature he claimed to be the Hound of the Baskervilles.
They ordered from a menu that featured courses such as “Mrs. Hudson’s Steak and Ale and Mushroom Pie,” which was self-explanatory; “Sherlock’s Own Favorite,” a grill of Scottish beef, and the “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and potatoes. Victoria opted for something lighter, an appetizer called “The Stockbroker’s Clerk” that was comprised of avocado slices and prawns on greens.
As they were finishing their meal, they were startled to hear loud voices issuing from the ground floor bar.
“Are you calling me a liar, sir?”
They couldn’t hear the reply, but Victoria looked at Jonathan, her eyes wide. “I could swear I’ve heard that voice before,” she said, getting up and creeping down the stairway, heading for the pub. He was right behind her.
They peered into the bar and saw two men at the far end of the room. The one who had his back to them was tall and thin. The other man who faced them was stout, and at the moment his face was the color of a ripe tomato.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jonathan said in a low voice from behind her.
“Reginald FitzSimmons.” Victoria couldn’t believe her eyes.
Jonathan took her elbow, and together they strode casually up to the pair, and to Victoria’s astonishment, when the second man turned she saw it was Alistair Huntley-Ames. He, too, looked thoroughly angry.
“Well, well. Looks like old home week,” Jonathan said, greeting the pair in an easy manner, although Victoria knew he was tense as a cat ready to pounce.
“Imagine finding the two of you here,” she added. “Anybody seen Jack the Ripper around lately?” She ignored Jonathan’s frown.
FitzSimmons’s expression changed from anger to distress when he saw Victoria. “I hope all is well with you, my dear,” he said, glancing from her to Jonathan. “Glad to see you are in good hands after that dreadful business.”
“Do you know anything about that…dreadful business, Mr. FitzSimmons?” she asked.
His face darkened. “I know a great deal more than this gentleman is willing to admit,” he replied. “I know who Jack the Ripper was.”
“Old or new?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Are you speaking of the original Ripper, or the copycat?”
“You know nothing, FitzSimmons,” Huntley-Ames broke in. “Your claim is a blatant prevarication and could be harmful to…those in high places. You have no proof of your absurd contention.” Victoria wondered what on earth he could be talking about. His words were derisive, but his tone was edged with what sounded like panic.
FitzSimmons glared at the other man. “Oh, but I do,” he said, slowly raising his glass to his lips. “I have cold, hard proof. Proof I intend to bring forward soon, one way or another. You can’t say you didn’t have your chance.”
Victoria didn’t know what they were talking about, but it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps Reginald FitzSimmons was trying to blackmail Huntley-Ames in some way. Did it have something to do with the murder? “I’d be interested in seeing what you have, Mr. FitzSimmons,” she said abruptly. “I don’t suppose that whatever you’re talking about is for sale?”
With that, she had FitzSimmons’s full attention. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I contacted Lord Chastain. He mentioned on Saturday he was a collector of Ripper memorabilia, and I just happen to have something in my bag of tricks that might be of interest to him, if he wasn’t such a cheapskate. He knows I’m telling the truth. He just doesn’t want to pay what it’s worth.”
“You’re a phony, and I’m a busy man,” said Huntley-Ames, preparing to leave. He turned to Jonathan. “I notice we have an appointment in the morning. Is it anything we can handle right now? I’m terribly booked, you know.”
“No, I think it would best be discussed in private,” Jonathan said, giving the man a confidential wink and nodding slightly in the direction of FitzSimmons.
He got the message. Important things were discussed in private, not in the presence of fools. “Very well, then, until tomorrow.” Huntley-Ames looked at FitzSimmons. “You’d best not attempt to peddle your lies or you might find yourself in some very hot water.”
After the other man left, Victoria asked, “What is he talking about?”
Reginald Smythe FitzSimmons glanced around the room. The only other occupant was the bartender, but even so, he said in a stage whisper, “I should not have spoken so boldly in public. Come with me to my flat. I have something that I believe will be of great interest to you.” He eyed her shrewdly. “If, that is, you are a bona fide buyer.”
“I could be. But where is your flat?” Victoria asked. “It wouldn’t by any chance be in Kent?” she added dryly.
He looked at her, not understanding at first. Then he smiled. “Oh, that. I registered that address because I don’t want people to know where I really live. I’ve lots of valuables, you see, and you never know who you can trust. But you’re Scotland Yard,” he said to Jonathan, “and you’re FBI,” to Victoria. “If I can’t trust the pair of you, who can I trust? Besides,” he huffed, heading for the door, “after buying a round for the house last Saturday night, I need the money.”
Victoria and the old man waited while Jonathan dashed upstairs to pay the bill for their lunches. The souvenirs were forgotten. Moments later, the trio emerged onto the sidewalk. “We’ll take the underground,” FitzSimmons said. “Fastest and cheapest way to get to my place.”
Then he stepped off the curb and directly into the path of an oncoming car.
Chapter Fourteen
It happened so quickly Jonathan had no time to grab the man’s arm and pull him back to the curb. He hadn’t even seen the car when he came out of the restaurant. He heard no squeal of tires, either. Just the roar of an engine and a dull thud when FitzSimmons’s body engaged the metal of the oncoming vehicle.
Victoria screamed. The car vanished around the corner. FitzSimmons lay bloody and unconscious in the street. “My God,” Jonathan swore, whipping out his cell phone to call the emergency number. Victoria ran to the old man’s crumpled form and felt for the carotid artery. “I can’t find a pulse,” she cried.
Jonathan knelt beside her and tried again, but there was nothing. The man’s face was blue, his eyes open but unseeing, his muscles slack. Jonathan caught the odor of urine and saw a dark stain against the fabric of FitzSimmons’s trousers. “He’s dead,” he said simply, staring at the corpse in disbelief. “Did you get a license number on the car?”
Victoria clutched his arm. “No. It…it happened so fast…”
A crowd had gathered, and Jonathan wanted to take Victoria away from the gruesome scene. But they had been first-hand witnesses, along with one diner who had seen the incident from the restaurant. The paramedics arrived in only a few moments, as well as two constables from the nearby Charing Cross Police Station. It took the medics only seconds to verify what Jonathan already knew. “’e must ’ave died instantly,” one of them said. “Looks like ’e took quite a blow to th’ midsection. Probably crushed �
�is ’eart.”
Jonathan and Victoria gave their statements to the police, for what good it would do. “The car was a late model sedan, sort of gray or taupe, nondescript except that it was larger than most. Could have been a Japanese make.” Jonathan wished he could do better than that. He was a policeman, for God’s sake. But that was the best he had to offer. “It happened so fast, neither of us got a good look at it.”
He took Victoria’s hand as the two of them watched the ambulance take the body away. “Guess that narrows the list of suspects.”
“Jonathan,” Victoria said, turning to him, “was that really a hit-and-run accident? Or could someone have wanted the old man dead?”
“Someone like who?”
“Think about it. The taxi driver said he let FitzSimmons off close to where the murder took place on Saturday night. Because he was placed so near the scene of the crime at the time it was committed, we both thought of him as a prime suspect. But what if…what if he didn’t commit the murder, but rather witnessed it?”
“And the killer has been following him around waiting for a chance to run him down? Seems like a bit of a stretch, but I suppose that’s as plausible as anything at the moment.”
“Here’s even more of a stretch, but I think we have to consider it. What if the killer was Lord Chastain? What if FitzSimmons witnessed the killing and called him to come here today because he was trying to blackmail him?”
“You think Huntley-Ames ran him over?” The notion was absurd, and he was surprised Victoria thought it was possible. “Does Lord Chastain fit the profile you’ve been working on?”
“Only in that he may be an abusive personality type. I don’t think he’s a serious contender for the perpetrator, but I’d check out his car at the very least.”
Sobered, they made their way back to Jonathan’s office where despite his skepticism about Lord Chastain’s involvement in the hit-and-run, he assigned one of his men to look into Victoria’s suggestion.
Later in the afternoon, he received a phone call from the detective inspector in charge of the case. “I thought you gave the victim’s name as Reginald Smythe FitzSimmons.”
“That’s correct.”
“Any reason he would have given you a phony name?”
“No, why?”
“We fingerprinted him. His name’s not FitzSimmons. It’s Brown. Burt Brown. We haven’t confirmed it totally yet, but we believe he is a retired custodian once employed by the royal family.”
The day after Reginald FitzSimmons was run down, Jonathan and Victoria led the team investigating the Whitechapel murder to a seedy flat in one of London’s lesser neighborhoods where the man named Burt Brown had lived. According to his neighbors, who gave a positive ID on him from a photograph, he was a nice enough man, although they thought him a bit off his head at times.
The building was a shabby brown stucco-sided structure containing a beehive of tiny flats. Victoria wondered if Reginald FitzSimmons’s reluctance to let anyone know where he lived had more to do with the rundown condition of the place than his concern about the theft of his valuables. She sincerely doubted he had any valuables worth stealing.
They found the front door secured by a chain lock, but rather than break it, they entered through the back with the help of the property manager. The door opened onto a postage stamp-sized kitchen. The sink was filled with unwashed dishes, but otherwise the room was neat enough, if sparsely furnished. A squawk and a flutter of wings greeted them, along with the smell of a birdcage in need of cleaning.
“Oh, the poor little thing,” Victoria exclaimed, going to the small cage in the corner and peering in at the frightened parakeet. “His food dish is almost empty, and he needs fresh water.”
“Don’t touch anything,” Jonathan warned. “Not yet.”
She scowled at him but did as he said, silently promising the little bird that he would soon be taken care of.
While she was fussing over the bird, Jonathan went into the small living room next to the kitchen, and moments later, she heard him say, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“What is it?” Going through the door, her chin dropped in amazement. Jonathan was standing across the room, laughing and shaking his head.
“Isn’t this just the most peculiar thing?” he said.
The living room looked almost identical to the exhibit they’d seen the day before at the Sherlock Holmes Pub. It was 221-B Baker Street all over again. Reginald Smythe FitzSimmons, a.k.a. Burt Brown, appeared to be more of a Sherlockian than she’d ever dreamed. He’d literally lived in a world he’d recreated from the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was fascinating and sad at the same time. Did he fancy himself to be the famous sleuth?
“Inspector, I think you’d better come in here.” One of the men beckoned from what she guessed was probably the bedroom.
Jonathan went into the room, and this time she heard him swear out loud. Hurrying to see what was the matter, Victoria passed from the genteel Victorian surroundings of FitzSimmons’s fantasy living room to a house of horrors.
“Jonathan, what is this?”
“This is why he knew so much about the Ripper murders,” he replied grimly.
Victoria felt sick to her stomach. From the walls, the mutilated victims of the original Ripper screamed silently at her from large posterized versions of the police photographs or sketches made at the time. They were all there, taped to the wall in a neat row, their names scrawled beneath each picture.
Mary Jane “Polly” Nichols. Annie Chapman. Liz Stride. Katherine Eddowes. Mary Kelly.
A gallery of gore.
On another wall was an enlarged map of the Whitechapel area, with bold red “X”s to mark the murder sites. Jonathan went to it and studied it for a moment, then said, “Look at this.” He pointed to the street where last Saturday’s murder had taken place. It, too, was marked. “You said you thought the killer was delusional and might believe himself to actually be Jack the Ripper. Victoria, I know you don’t believe he did it, but I think Burt Brown is our man.”
Saddened, Victoria had to agree. Despite his age and bulk, this man’s surroundings spoke volumes as to his mental instability. He was obviously a loner, alienated from society, delusional, and from what he’d used to decorate his bedroom, it was likely he hated women. There was a scrapbook on one nightstand containing photocopies of newspaper clippings of the original murders, and fresh, new ones about last Saturday’s event. The man had been as obsessed with Jack the Ripper as he had been with Sherlock Holmes.
“He claimed Jack the Ripper was alive and well because he planned to be the new Ripper,” she speculated reluctantly. “I guess he made up the address in Kent thinking it would somehow throw the police off.”
“He swiped some stationery from the hotel and wrote that letter to the Times, probably over a glass of stout in the hotel bar,” Jonathan said. “He might have mailed it as we left the hotel on our little excursion to Whitechapel. The post office is just around the corner.”
“He was the one who urged us all to go to the Jack the Ripper Pub that night, but he stayed long after the rest of us had left.” Victoria picked up the thread of Jonathan’s thoughts. “Maybe he was faking his state of inebriation. The driver let him out just a few blocks away, and he found his victim.”
“Whitechapel is only two stops from here on the underground. It would have been easy for him to simply walk away, hop a train and disappear into the night. He brought the liver with him, wrapped it here, and went back briefly to the hotel to make his delivery. He could easily have done that using the underground for transportation.”
Victoria looked up at him. “Do you suppose that’s how the original Ripper escaped so easily? Was the underground built back then?”
“It was. And some people believe that he used it to make his escapes. I even saw it in a movie once.” Jonathan turned to one of his men. “Check the closets. See if there’s blood on anything. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find that poor woman’s blood
on his coat.”
But they didn’t. Although Burt Brown’s meager wardrobe was shabby and in need of dry cleaning, there was not a spot of blood on any garment they found. Their search, in fact, turned up little, certainly nothing of any value that he might have sold to Huntley-Ames. Besides the furnishings and his personal belongings, the only thing of interest was a small lined writing tablet.
“This looks like the kind of paper the warning note was written on,” Jonathan remarked, putting it into an evidence bag. They searched for but did not find anything, however, that provided a sample of FitzSimmons’s handwriting. When he was satisfied that they had combed the old man’s habitat thoroughly, he ordered his men to seal off the flat until the investigation was complete.
“Now I really wonder what Lord Chastain was so upset about yesterday at the Sherlock Holmes Pub,” Victoria remarked. “If FitzSimmons was the killer, he wouldn’t have been trying to blackmail him.”
“He said Lord Chastain was a collector of Ripper memorabilia,” Jonathan said. “Maybe he was trying to pawn off some of those posters.”
But Victoria shook her head. “I don’t think so. They aren’t of any real worth. There must have been something else. Something much more valuable…”
They started to leave, but Victoria paused when she saw the bird in the cage. “We can’t just leave him here, Jonathan. He’ll die.”
Jonathan frowned. “What are we going to do with a budgie?”
“Take him home?”
Jonathan and Victoria arrived back at his flat later that evening, Victoria toting the bird cage as she climbed the stairs behind Jonathan. She knew he was unhappy that they’d been unable to outplace the bird among his colleagues at the Yard.
“Mrs. Dunstan will have a fit,” he growled as he unlocked the door.
“Maybe. Or maybe she’ll be the one to take him.”
“Don’t hold your breath. She’s a great one for neatness, and neat is not the word to describe that bird.” Victoria hid her grin, thinking of the drift of seed husks the bird had spit onto Jonathan’s desk during the course of the afternoon.
