The Esther & Jack Enright Box Set

by David Field

  ‘One of them’s in the City,’ Reid reminded him. ‘I’ve already been warned off that one by the City Police Commissioner.’

  ‘No doubt you have,’ Abberline observed, ‘but Sir Charles has cleared the way for me and they’re expecting me down there while we stand here wasting time. I’ll leave you and Percy Enright to investigate the one on your patch, then report to me. Both of you together, that is — I’m getting tired of separate memos from each of you, complaining about the other.’

  They were dealing with what the evening papers would screamingly announce as a ‘doubt event’. There had been two murders the previous night which, although little more than a ten minute walk apart, involved two separate police organisations. The one to which Fred Abberline was heading, with the unarguable authority of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren behind him, was in Mitre Square, only a few yards inside the territory of the City of London Police, traditionally independent of the Metropolitan Police within its one square mile of jurisdiction and fiercely protective of that independence. The second, to which, ironically, Reid would have further to walk than Abberline, was in Berner Street and the link between the two murder sites was the Commercial Road, heavy with pedestrians and traffic even in the early hours of the morning. If these two murders were the work of the same person, they had been very lucky not to get caught.

  As Abberline passed through the token cordon of uniformed constables of the City Police at the Church Passage entrance to Mitre Square, he was met by Inspector Collard of the City CID and escorted to the place where the body had first been found, at around fifteen minutes to two that morning.

  ‘We’ve obviously had the unfortunate wretch removed to the mortuary, at the request of Dr Brown, who first attended,’ Collard advised him. ‘It was a woman in her forties, very badly mutilated, and when we realised the similarity between this one and the one you men had in Spitalfields recently, my boss contacted yours.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’ Abberline enquired curtly.

  ‘Several of our constables were on beat duty around the area at the time, but they neither saw nor heard anything, it seems. The body was discovered by Constable Watkins, who’s seated in the gutter there, taking a rest. He was supposed to have come off night shift several hours ago, but I asked him to remain for long enough to talk to you, so if you’d be so good as to start with him, he can go home. He’s badly shaken, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Who’s that civilian standing with that other constable?’ Abberline enquired.

  ‘A man called Lawende, who claims that he saw the victim standing talking to a man at the entrance to the passage you just came through.’

  ‘I’ll take him first,’ Abberline insisted. ‘Your constable will have to wait.’

  By the middle of the morning, Abberline had pieced together a sorry tale of missed opportunities. It seemed that a mere ten minutes had elapsed between Constable Watkins’ first sweep through Mitre Square, at 1.30 am, seeking among other things to flush prostitutes and their clients out of the convenient alcoves and doorways in the Square and his discovery of the body at 1.40 am. She was lying in a grotesque pose in one of the darkest parts of the Square, her skirts up around her waist, her stomach ripped open and her throat cut. Watkins had sounded the alarm and the police surgeon had been summoned. Watkins was adamant that he had seen and heard nothing, but the civilian witness Lawende proved more helpful.

  He’d been leaving a club in Duke Street at 1.30 am when he had noticed a man and a woman at the entrance to Church Passage, which led into Mitre Square. He took the woman to be a prostitute, to judge by her generally dishevelled appearance and the man with her he described as being ‘rather rough and shabby’. He was aged in his thirties, approximately five feet seven inches tall, of medium build with a fair moustache. He was wearing a loose-fitting ‘pepper and salt’ jacket and a grey peaked cap, with a ‘reddish’ scarf knotted around his neck. His overall appearance was that of a sailor and Abberline made a sour mental note that he would be obliged to make enquiries at the docks in due course, since the newspapers would no doubt carry accounts of an insane merchant seaman running amok once his vessel had tied up.

  He was bracing himself to attend at the mortuary when he received a serious distraction. A police wagon pulled up in Duke Street and out stepped Sir Charles Warren.

  ‘You might have waited for me, Abberline,’ Warren declared, red in the face. ‘I left not long after you and I’ve spent the past few hours in Goulston Street, a couple of streets up from here and clearly on our territory. One of our constables found a piece torn from an apron in a tenement up there and someone had written an anti-Jewish slogan on the wall above it. I ordered its removal before it caused a riot. Just to let you know, since I’m going back up to Whitehall without delay — the Home Secretary wants an urgent report before things get out of hand. Get me all you can on both murders and cable me the essential details before I leave for the day. Good day to you.’

  Abberline sighed and went back to the matter in hand. Inspector Collard was still inside Mitre Square, which had filled with gawping spectators once the police had reopened access to it and Abberline was still in need of even basic information.

  ‘Do we know who the victim is yet?’ he enquired.

  Collard inclined his head from side to side in a gesture of uncertainty. ‘Not yet, but we found a pawn ticket in her possession in the name of Jane Kelly, with an address in Spitalfields, so you might want to send someone off to the pawnbroker.’

  ‘That’s my patch, isn’t it?’

  ‘Your patch, but our body. I’ll let you know when we have something more positive.’

  Abberline snorted derisively and headed for the mortuary.

  Meanwhile, Reid and Percy Enright were surrounded by far too much information in nearby Berner Street. In Dutfield’s Yard, which contained the club premises of the International Working Mens’ Educational Society, they were surrounded by members who had been in the club in the early hours of that morning and were now clamouring to go home and get on with their lives, but were being sternly instructed to remain where they were until they had given statements.

  The reason for all this was the discovery, at approximately 1 am, of a woman’s body in the entrance to the yard. It had been found by a man returning to the yard in a cart pulled by a pony, which had shied when startled by the presence of the body in the open gateway. Her throat had been cut, but there were no other obvious injuries and Dr Phillips would later contrast the simplicity of these injuries with the more complex ones he had identified weeks earlier on Annie Chapman.

  The victim was rapidly identified as ‘Long Liz’, a local prostitute whose real name was Elizabeth Stride, but who was believed to have been Swedish by birth. She was a regular at various public houses in the area and Berner Street was very much on her ‘beat’, where she would often be seen offering herself to men as they passed by where she would lounge suggestively in doorways, until their more lawful occupiers ordered her off.

  Reid and Enright agreed with each other for once, in concluding that the man with the pony and cart — Louis Diemschutz — had almost certainly interrupted the final moments of this latest victim and that the assailant had made good their escape either by leaping the back fence of the yard, or slinking away under the cover of darkness as Diemschutz ran into the neighbouring club for assistance. The members of the club who had been detained until well into daylight hours were eventually allowed to leave after assuring either Reid or Enright that they had seen and heard nothing, given that songs were being sung within the club at the time of the discovery. When Reid made enquiry regarding the arrangements for the post-mortem, he was advised that this was being delayed because Dr Phillips had been called in by City Police Surgeon Dr Brown, given his previous experience of examining the body of Annie Chapman.

  Reid found Abberline standing morosely alongside the two doctors as they surveyed the as yet unidentified remains from Mitre Square.

  ‘If
this is the work of the same man who did for Annie Chapman,’ Phillips observed, ‘then he must have been well gone in liquor. Annie Chapman was anatomised with a precision that was almost clinical, whereas this one’s simply been butchered.’

  ‘The left kidney’s missing,’ Brown pointed out, ‘and even I would have experienced considerable difficulty in removing that in almost total darkness, even though I know where to find it. Are you suggesting that a mere amateur got lucky?’

  ‘He only took half the womb, though,’ Phillips pointed out. ‘He went in through the middle and slashed out the top half like he was scooping out a melon. If you or I were attempting that, would we not instead make a circular incision and remove the cervix while leaving the vagina intact? And how do you explain the facial lacerations? And all in the space of ten minutes, according to the witnesses?’

  ‘Where are the clothes?’ Abberline enquired.

  ‘Over there, on that table,’ he was advised. He walked across, carrying the piece of torn and blood-soaked apron he had been handed at Goulston Street and matched it exactly to the piece missing from the clothing removed from their nameless victim.

  ‘Our well-butchered lady may have been in Goulston Street at some time prior to her death,’ he observed.

  ‘At least, part of her apron was,’ Reid corrected him. ‘It may well be that our killer dropped it on his way back from either Berner Street or Mitre Square.’

  ‘We don’t even know if the two deaths are connected,’ Abberline reminded him. ‘Or what order they occurred in.’

  ‘I’m no police officer,’ Phillips reminded him sardonically, ‘but if the woman in the club yard died at 1 am and — according to Brown here — this woman was done in at least half an hour later, doesn’t that suggest the order of service?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Reid conceded, ‘but I need to add in the remaining information that Sergeant Enright was left there to collect.’

  The sun was setting through the side window of Reid’s first floor office as he and Enright began pooling what they had got, ahead of the return of Abberline, who had bravely undertaken to remain for the remainder of the post-mortem on the Mitre Square corpse. Enright was quite pleased with himself.

  ‘I managed to locate several witnesses to Stride’s last known movements,’ he smiled, ‘and the most promising is a Constable Smith, who saw a woman answering her description in Berner Street, opposite the club, with a man in tow. The man is described as 28 years old, wearing a dark coat and a hard deerstalker hat. He was carrying a parcel approximately 6 inches high and 18 inches in length, wrapped in newspaper. It could, of course, have been yesterday’s fish, but my bet is that it was a knife.’

  ‘When was this?’ Reid enquired.

  ‘About 12.30 in the morning, according to Smith.’

  ‘We’ll have to wait for Abberline and see if he has any matching description,’ Reid conceded, ‘but I’m slowly abandoning my original theory that the killer might be connected in some way with Pearly Poll.’

  ‘Not before time,’ Enright replied quietly. ‘So what’s next?’

  ‘Find out all you can from that pawnbroker. I’d like to at least know the identity of those pathetic remains in the City mortuary.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Working closely together, uncle and nephew finally had a name for the Mitre Square corpse. Percy Enright had been set the task of identifying her and had been allowed, at his request, to take Jack with him, ‘in order to acquaint himself with the finer points of detective work.’ Since Reid still suspected that Jack would pass on anything he discovered to Scotland Yard anyway, via his uncle, he had agreed and the two men had begun with the pawnbroker at whose premises a lady giving the name Jane Kelly had pawned a pair of boots two days previously.

  The pawnbroker had given them an address of Cooney’s Lodging House in Flower and Dean Street that ‘Jane Kelly’ had given as her home address. There was only one other person called Kelly living there and he initially tried to deny any knowledge of the lady, until the doss house Superintendant ‘peached’ on him by informing an insistent Percy Enright that a woman calling herself ‘Mrs Jane Kelly’ shared the room occupied by her presumed husband John. John Kelly had finally broken down when confronted with the mangled remains at the mortuary and had tearfully advised them that the lady’s real name had been Catherine Eddowes, although she was believed to have once been married to a man named Conway. She had also, he advised them, been ‘a hopeless pisspot’ and something of an embarrassment to him, as the result of which he was seriously considering throwing her out on her ear if she didn’t start bringing in some money towards the rent.

  Catherine had disappeared on the day before her death, claiming that she was journeying to Bermondsey to borrow money from her daughter. She may well have succeeded, it seems, since Kelly had heard a rumour — subsequently confirmed — to the effect that Catherine had been picked up by police, hopelessly drunk in Aldgate High Street and held at Bishopsgate Police Station until she was sufficiently sober to be released at one o’clock in the morning.

  Her movements during the final half hour of her life were a mystery, since her most direct route home would have been straight through Aldgate and left up Commercial Street. Instead she had for some reason or other wandered into Duke Street, perhaps in search of licensed premises that might still be open and it was there that she had been seen with the man believed to have been her killer. But the journey from Bishopsgate to Duke Street should not have taken her more than ten minutes, so where had she been in the meantime? She had no money on her body, so had she perhaps been robbed?

  It was while John Kelly was reminiscing tearfully about his seven happy years with Catherine that something dropped out that made Jack prick up his ears. He was the one taking notes while Uncle Percy was asking the questions and Kelly had mentioned that apart from her fondness for too much alcohol, Catherine had been a friendly, helpful sort of woman who would go out of her way to help anyone, ‘even girls what gets inter trouble.’

  ‘What did you mean by that?’ Jack enquired.

  ‘Well, she knew this woman what could get rid o’ babies what wasn’t wanted, if yer get me drift an’ she were always ready ter make the necessary introductions.’

  ‘You mean that Catherine knew an abortionist?’ Jack persevered.

  ‘Yeah, if that’s what yer calls ’em,’ Kelly agreed.

  ‘Do you happen to know where this woman operated from?’ Jack enquired with a warning glance at his uncle.

  ‘Dunno exactly, an’ I wouldn’t want ter get anybody in trouble wi’ you lot,’ Kelly replied, ‘but I did once ’ear Kate tell someone — a woman called Kelly, funny enough —– that it were somewhere down Whitechapel ’Igh Street.’

  ‘Do you have an address for this Kelly woman?’ Percy enquired.

  Kelly shrugged his shoulders. ‘Somewhere off Dorset Street, as far as I were told, not that it were any o’ my business. She only come ’ere the once, ter ask Kate about the woman what did abortions an’ she weren’t the only one. I only remember ’er on account’ve us ’avin’ the same name — she were called Mary Kelly — but as far as I could tell we weren’t related. I ’ope not anyroad, since they reckon she’s the biggest tottie in Dorset Street, an’ that’s sayin’ summat. Kelly’s a pretty common name around ’ere an’ she were proper Irish, not like me, born an’ bred in Bow.’

  ‘I think that concludes our questions, Mr Kelly,’ Percy advised him. ‘We’ll leave you in peace now, to grieve over your loss. I’ll be sure to let you know when the inquest’s to be held.’

  ‘What did you make of that?’ Jack enquired as they made their way down Brick Lane on their way back to Leman Street.

  ‘Seemed an honest enough cove,’ Percy replied, ‘but what was the relevance of those questions about an abortionist? You still trying to keep in Reid’s good books, with his crackpot theory about Pearly Poll?’

  ‘It means another possible link between the lady in question and the ser
ies of murders,’ Jack advised him. ‘We think that Poll runs her baby murdering business from George Yard, which is just off Whitechapel High Street. If this latest victim — Catherine Eddowes, as we now know her to be — was acting as some sort of pimp for Poll’s abortion business, then she may have been another one who Poll wanted silenced by her tame lunatic.’

  ‘Take my advice, young Jack,’ Percy replied, ‘never form a firm opinion too early in a case and then try to make the evidence fit your theory. Keep an open mind and store every little bit of information you get, until the conclusion’s inescapable. Like my conclusion that the young lady heading towards us is made just for you.’

  Even from a distance Jack had no difficulty in identifying the most important young lady in the world to him, but it wasn’t until they were barely ten yards away from her that she looked up from the ground beneath her feet, gave a slight start, then broke into a beaming smile.

  ‘Jack! And Mr Enright! What brings you up this way?’

  ‘What else?’ Jack replied. ‘There’s been another murder — Aldgate way this time, so don’t worry — but the victim lived just up the road behind us and we’ve been questioning her man. And now tell us what you’re doing heading that way.’

  ‘I’m on my way to Lamb Street, with my latest completed work in this holdall, and hopefully I’ll be bringing some new work back with me. I prefer to walk up Brick Lane, rather than Commercial Street, which is always much dustier and noisier, but if I’d gone the other way I’d have missed you completely. I hope we’re still on for Sunday?’

  ‘Of course we are,’ Jack grinned back. ‘We can decide where to go when I pick you up.’

  ‘Keep him safe, won’t you Percy?’ Esther smiled before walking on.

  ‘She called me Percy, like she was already family!’ the older man mused out loud, his face radiant with the experience. ‘Jack, my boy, have you asked her to marry you yet?’