Lestrade and the Ripper

by M. J. Trow

Lestrade handed the crumpled piece of envelope with the crest of the Sussex Regiment he had been handed long ago near the corpse of Mary Ann Nicholls. Lees held it to the light. ‘The Sussex Regiment,’ he said. ‘I see blood, much blood . . .’

  ‘Oh?’ Lestrade lowered himself uneasily onto a chair, so that he straddled it, resting his elbows on the back.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Lees’ face fell. ‘That’s Quebec. The Regiment fought there. Nothing to do with this case at all.’

  ‘How about this?’

  Lees took the grape stems a constable had found near the body of Liz Stride. ‘Yes,’ his face became ashen grey, ‘they shared these. Another lady of the night. Some of her teeth were missing. I see . . . a camera. No, there was a second.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lestrade was impressed again. ‘Photographs were taken . . .’

  ‘. . . of the eyes of the second,’ Lees said suddenly.

  ‘Right again,’ Lestrade admitted. ‘She shared the grapes with whom?’

  ‘The man on the omnibus’ he said.

  ‘What about this?’ Lestrade gave Lees the cashew nuts still in their bag as on the day Fred Wensley gave them to him.

  Lees held them against his cheek, rocking slightly. ‘These too,’ he said. ‘I see a medical man,’ he whispered, ‘skilful, trained fingers. They’ve been all over these.’

  ‘The mad doctor,’ Lestrade said, half to himself.

  ‘Madder than you know.’

  ‘And lastly, this.’ He gave the sensitive a piece of Martha Tabram’s dress, faded and torn.

  Lees’ eyes widened. He looked confused, and frowned at the material. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t fit.’

  ‘Not our man?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Not the same man’ said Lees. Lestrade was not surprised. Martha Tabram had never quite fitted the pattern, somehow. ‘Edmund. The name Edmund?’ Lestrade looked blank. ‘Wait. There’s more.’ He beckoned Lestrade closer. ‘I see boys.’

  Lestrade looked around. ‘Boys?’ he repeated.

  ‘A school. I see a gown. A rope . . . It’s you!’ he suddenly snapped, jabbing a finger into Lestrade’s eye. ‘Oh, I do apologise, Inspector,’ he said.

  Lestrade glared at him through his tears. ‘Quite all right’ he hissed. ‘Are you accusing me of being Jack the Ripper?’

  Lees stood up, his face ashen in the morning sun. ‘No,’ he said, holding up the tatters of Tabram’s dress, ‘but you have met the man who did this. You know him, Inspector.’

  The Inspector and the sensitive took an omnibus at the corner. Lees was paying. They alighted at Brook Street a little after lunch and stood before the imposing classical façade of Number 74.

  ‘Lestrade,’ Lees gripped his arm, ‘I can’t . . . I don’t feel well . . .’ and he slumped against the portico.

  ‘All right, Mr Lees.’ Lestrade supported him. ‘This is my business now. You can go home. And thank you. Thank you very much. If I need you again, I’ll know where to find you.’

  A sour-faced maid showed Lestrade into a plush lobby and here he was asked to wait. He took in the opulence, the power, and yet he was struck too by a hint of sorrow, deeper and more haunting, as he paced the black and white tiles.

  ‘Inspector Lestrade?’ a lady called from the grand sweep of the staircase. ‘I am Lady Gull. How may I help you?’

  Gull. The ornithology which had been so vital to Lestrade in the El Guano Affair came to his rescue now. The doctor who had removed Annie Crook from Bedlam had been called Herring or Glaucous. Both of them types of gull.

  ‘I am here to see your husband, madam, if he is the master of the house.’

  Lady Gull floated downwards. ‘Peggy, some refreshment for the Inspector – in the library, I think. Shall we?’ She showed him into the oak-panelled room, with wall-to-wall anatomy tomes and a large globe, draped with a velvet cloth with curious symbols, a pair of dividers woven in gold thread.

  ‘I’m afraid my husband isn’t well,’ she said, inviting him to sit down. ‘He’s been under rather a lot of strain recently.’

  ‘You must forgive me, Lady Gull, but I am unaware of who your husband is.’

  ‘You have come to see him, Inspector, and you do not know who he is. Isn’t that rather odd?’

  ‘Not really, madam. You see, I am from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Well,’ Lady Gull spread her satin dress to cover most of the chaise longue, ‘he is Physician in Ordinary to Her Majesty.’

  ‘That must indeed be a stressful occupation,’ Lestrade agreed.

  ‘It’s not just that.’ Lady Gull looked anxious. ‘My husband has been followed, Inspector. Here, to this house.’

  ‘By a bearded gentleman with blue eyes and a wild look?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Why, yes, how did you know? Ah, Peggy.’ The maid arrived. ‘Will you take tea, Inspector?’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’

  ‘I’ll do it, Peggy.’ The maid bobbed and left. ‘Cream and sugar, Mr Lestrade?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘This man who followed William. Was he a policeman?’

  ‘No, madam. He is a medium.’

  ‘A medium?’ Lady Gull was astonished. ‘Do you mean a spiritualist?’

  ‘A clairvoyant.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Lady Gull,’ Lestrade burned his tongue horribly on the tea but tried desperately not to show it, ‘I should tell you that I am investigating the Whitechapel murders.’

  Lady Gull’s response was to drop her cup onto the Chinese carpet. ‘Then you know,’ she said.

  Lestrade felt the hairs on his neck creep. ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me?’ he hedged.

  Lady Gull walked to the window. ‘My husband was not home on the nights of the murders, Inspector,’ she told him, ‘not any of them. At first, of course, I paid no attention. William is a busy man. He lectures, he tends the royal family, he attends lodge meetings . . .’

  ‘Lodge meetings?’ Lestrade interrupted.

  Lady Gull waved her hand towards the velvet pall with the gold devices. ‘My husband is a freemason, Inspector. Rather a senior one, I believe.’

  Bells were clanging in Lestrade’s head. Surely Sherlock Holmes couldn’t be right?

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘On the night that that poor Chapman woman met her end, William came in late – three, perhaps four in the morning. His shirt was covered in blood . . .’ Lady Gull’s voice trailed away.

  They both jumped at the slam of a door. Lestrade duly allowed the contents of his cup to join Lady Gull’s on the carpet. A heavy, fearsome man with deep-set eyes and a centre parting stood there, hands thrust into his pockets by the thumbs, gold fob swinging at his waistcoat.

  ‘Hilda. Who have we here?’ he growled with some distaste.

  ‘Dear,’ she fumbled with the brasswork on the bureau, ‘this is Inspector Lestrade, of Scotland Yard. Mr Lestrade, my husband, Sir William Gull.’

  Lestrade stood up. ‘I am here concerning the matter of . . .’

  ‘The Whitechapel murders, yes, I heard. What have they to do with me?’ He brushed past Lestrade and poured himself a brandy from the tantalus.

  ‘I was hoping you’d tell me, sir’ Lestrade said.

  Gull spun round. ‘What the devil do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Lady Gull has told me you were out on the nights in question.’

  Gull glowered at his wife, who shrank back. ‘William,’ she whispered, ‘I had to.’

  ‘So was half London, I’ll wager.’ Gull maintained his defiance. ‘The nights in question!’ He quaffed the brandy and poured himself another. ‘How pathetic your jargon is, you flatfeet. I had my fill of coppers on the Bravo case . . .’

  ‘William!’ Lady Gull exploded, then retreated as his eyes lashed her. ‘William, it’s no use. This gentleman knows.’

  ‘Knows? What?’

  ‘The blood-stained shirt,’ she said, tears running the length of her pale face.

  ‘A nosebleed,’ he dismissed it. �
�Nothing more.’

  ‘Jubela, Jubelum, Jubelo,’ said Lestrade. ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.’

  Gull’s glass dropped from his hand, falling to the ground to lie alongside the two cups already there. He dropped near them, on his knees in the Chinese pile. Lady Gull rushed to comfort him, sobbing as the huge man knelt there in silence, as though poleaxed. When he looked up at Lestrade again the fight had gone out of him. ‘I haven’t been well,’ he said. ‘On the night Annie Chapman died I found myself sitting upstairs in my room. How I got there or where I’d been, I haven’t the faintest idea.’

  ‘Do you know the Whitechapel area, sir?’ Lestrade asked.

  Gull shook his head. ‘My coachman, Netley, does.’

  ‘Do you like grapes, Sir William?’

  The Great Physician looked at him. ‘Why, yes. Why do you ask?’

  ‘And cashews?’

  ‘I’d do something about that cold,’ Gull said, dully. He hauled himself upright. ‘I haven’t been myself for some time,’ he said. He crossed to Lestrade and looked at him directly with those piercing dark eyes. ‘Lestrade, am I the Whitechapel murderer? Am I Jack the Ripper?’

  But before Lestrade could answer, the maid appeared again. ‘Begging your pardon, sir, mum, there’s some doctors to see Sir William.’

  ‘Mr Lestrade,’ Lady Gull took his arm, ‘we must obviously talk further. I wonder, however, if you would allow William to see these men. They are colleagues of his. I asked them to come. It is most urgent they see him.’

  Lestrade hesitated for one long, dangerous moment, then he relented. ‘I shall call back tomorrow, Lady Gull,’ he said. ‘Sir William,’ and he left the library as a dozen, black coated, top-hatted gentlemen trooped past him through the lobby. As Lady Gull made her exit, before the door closed, Lestrade saw the arrivals one by one hook their left knees over their arms before shaking Gull’s hand. He did likewise.

  When Lestrade returned to Number 74 Brook Street, Mayfair, as he promised he would, the house was in darkness, shutters closed and locked. Furious with himself, he ran round it hammering maniacally on every door he could find. At last, the maid appeared at the French windows at the rear.

  ‘Where is he?’ Lestrade demanded. ‘Where is Sir William Gull?’

  ‘Oh, sir,’ the maid blew violently into her apron, ‘he’s gone.’

  ‘I can see that,’ snapped the Inspector. ‘Where?’

  She pointed skyward and, slowly, the light dawned. He gripped the girl’s bony shoulders. ‘What? Do you mean he’s dead?’

  ‘As a dodo,’ she said.

  ‘But yesterday he was as fit as a fiddle. Swigging brandy to the manor born.’

  ‘I know,’ she sobbed, ‘but right after those gentlemen left he was took queer. A stroke, it was. He had one a year back. Missus was ever so brave.’

  ‘Where is Lady Gull?’

  ‘With friends, sir, until the funeral.’

  ‘What friends? Where?’ Lestrade shook her.

  ‘I don’t know, sir, honest to God, I don’t. Missus didn’t say. I was to lock up the house and go home. I was doing just that when you come round. Whatever he’s done, sir, it’s all over now, isn’t it?’

  Lestrade tilted his bowler back and sighed. ‘No, my dear girl, not by a long chalk it isn’t.’

  What with the pressures on the Metropolitan and City Forces that November, Abberline refused to spare a copper on chasing the dead. Convinced that the late Sir William Gull was not as late as all that, Lestrade combed London’s undertakers from Jay’s to the Seven Dials Emporium and not one could be found who would admit to laying out the Physician in Ordinary, nor indeed anything else. Several of them were impressed with Lestrade’s parchment skin and sour expression, however; eight of them gave him their cards in case he needed them in the near future and two of them offered him a job. The burial grounds and cemeteries were no more use. He wobbled perilously on planking above a new and yawning grave at Kensal Green, brought a funeral at Highgate to a standstill, insisting on viewing the corpse, and got himself locked in a vault at Abney Park after the cemetery was closed. Twice during the night he was reminded of the old police joke; he distinctly heard a voice beside him on the shelf saying, ‘Cold in ’ere, ain’t it?’ He put it down to exhaustion.

  In the morning, after the inevitable altercation with the turnkey, he stumbled numbly in a different direction – to King’s Bench Walk in the Temple, in search of his other quarry, Mr Druitt. After all, if Gull was dead, and if Lestrade leapt to the wrong conclusions, another East End woman might die. No stone must be left unturned. But Mr Druitt was not there. And other members of his Chambers said he had not been for some time. He was in the habit of frequenting his cousin Lionel’s surgery in the Minories – had the Inspector thought of trying there?

  In the Autumn of Terror, the busy face of a great city became greyer and older as Lestrade travelled east. The gaiety of the costers, the shouts of the street vendors were somehow duller, somehow less. The bobbies had always patrolled in twos in those mean streets, but now so did the recruiting sergeants, and the harlots were in knots of three and four. Even the old flower seller who offered Lestrade a bunch of heather for his lucky face carried a brick in her basket. From the banner headlines of the Standard and News, the press screamed for vengeance and police action. Lestrade turned his collar up against the cold of hostility and rang the surgery bell of Dr Druitt. It was opened by a man a few years his junior, with sad, dark eyes, a small moustache and a centre parting, not unlike the photograph of the Duke of Clarence Lestrade had seen smashed recently. And not unlike the eye-witness accounts of men seen talking to the various deceased near Buck’s Row and Hanbury Street and Berners Street and Mitre Square and Dorset Street.

  ‘I was looking for Dr Druitt,’ Lestrade lied.

  ‘I’m sorry, the surgery is closed; I am Montague Druitt, the Doctor’s cousin. May I help?’

  ‘I am Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Lestrade noted the reaction. ‘I am making enquiries into the Whitechapel murders. We have reason to believe that your cousin may be involved.’

  ‘Lionel?’ Druitt visibly rocked back. ‘Surely not. Can I offer you something, Inspector?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Lestrade would settle for almost anything.

  ‘Iced coffee?’

  His face fell. ‘No thank you,’ he said. ‘Do you have access to your cousin’s instruments, Mr Druitt?’

  ‘Why, yes, there was a time when I toyed with going into medicine, Inspector. I spend quite a bit of my time here.’

  He deftly unlocked a cabinet and slid out several drawers of glittering steel. Lestrade positively blanched at some of them – the ones he had only ever seen before in a knacker’s yard.

  ‘This is his favourite,’ smiled Druitt, holding up an ebony-shafted knife.

  ‘Single-edged,’ muttered Lestrade; ‘about an inch wide.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Tell me, Mr Druitt, from your knowledge of anatomy, would it be possible to cut through bone with this?’

  ‘No. You’d probably need a saw. This,’ he held one up; ‘or, for anything more elaborate, this,’ he held up a fret saw. ‘Inspector,’ Druitt closed the drawers, ‘you can’t really suspect Lionel?’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Lestrade, looking for a chair to sit on. ‘He knows the area, he has the weapons and he has the skill to carry out the appalling mutilations.’

  ‘But these women were . . . unfortunates, Inspector. Lionel would have nothing to do with them.’

  ‘What if it’s not unfortunates he’s killing, Mr Druitt?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘What if your cousin is deranged? If in his mind, it’s . . . oh, I don’t know . . . his mother he’s killing? Or yours?’

  Druitt turned pale and had to steady himself against his cousin’s skeleton, which rattled as it felt his weight.

  ‘My mother?’ he whispered
. ‘Why do you bring my mother into this?’

  ‘Oh, no reason.’ Lestrade watched his man intently.

  Druitt stared at him. ‘No reason. That’s very apt, Mr Lestrade. You know of course that Lionel is mad, don’t you?’

  ‘Really, Mr Druitt? Could you explain?’

  The failed lawyer slumped into a chair, the one Lestrade had been unable to find. ‘It’s the little things that give him away.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘For instance, his telephone calls from this surgery to friends in Edinburgh.’

  ‘No telephone machines in Edinburgh?’ Lestrade guessed.

  Druitt shook his head. ‘No telephone machines in this surgery,’ he said. ‘Then there’s Australia.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘He wants to go there, Inspector. Can you think of a more obvious symptom of insanity than that? No, I fear cousin Lionel is going the way of his mother.’

  ‘His mother?’

  Druitt nodded sagely. ‘My aunt. Before she died, she accused him, in her ravings, of being Spring-heeled Jack. Little did the poor old thing realise he was actually Jack the Ripper.’

  ‘I’m not actually accusing your cousin, Mr Druitt,’ Lestrade said.

  ‘Oh? But I thought . . . oh, well, no matter. Would it help to see Lionel’s operating theatre, Mr Lestrade?’

  ‘Thank you, it might.’

  Druitt fumbled in his pocket for the keys and a black phial fell out and rolled across the carpet to Lestrade’s feet. He stooped to pick it up, blinking in disbelief. ‘What is this, Mr Druitt?’

  ‘It’s a talisman,’ he told him. ‘It contains writings . . .’

  ‘. . . from the Dharam Ganth,’ Lestrade finished for him.

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘May I ask how you got this?’

  ‘Certainly. It was given to me by a Sikh boy to whom I was once tutor.’

  ‘A pupil at Blackheath?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘You are remarkably well informed, Inspector.’ Druitt was for the first time suspicious. ‘Do you always check so minutely the backgrounds of cousins of your suspects?’

  ‘Always,’ Lestrade beamed.

  ‘Actually, Cherak Singh attended a school in the Midlands – Northampton, I believe.’