The Esther & Jack Enright Box Set

by David Field

  ‘Come back ’ere a week today and I’ll see yer right,’ Poll promised, then walked through the side door and into the alley that formed part of George Yard. She stared down towards the street exit, where Percy was talking to the young constable who’d been with that police inspector at the inquest into Martha’s death, except today he wasn’t wearing his uniform. With a dismissive smirk she turned and went back to the lodging house up the alleyway.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘You obviously still have the same cook,’ Percy Enright smiled across at his sister-in-law Constance as he laid the spoon down on the plate with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘The lamb was roasted to perfection and that apple tart was fit for the Queen.’

  They were all seated around the dining table in the house in Church Lane, Barking, and had just completed the finest meal Esther could ever remember. Even her own mother’s cooking had been, to put it politely, adequate and there was a limit to how often one could enjoy gefilte fish. She had amazed herself by how much she had managed to consume, given her normal diet of bread and cheese, but she was relieved that there were no more courses and that Alice was busily engaged in clearing the table.

  ‘It was indeed delicious,’ Esther complimented Constance from where she sat next to Percy, with Jack and Lucy across the table on either side of their mother, ‘and thank you so much for inviting us.’

  ‘I like to ensure that Jackson gets at least one good meal every so often,’ Constance replied with a smile and a sidelong glance at her son, ‘since I dread to think what rubbish he normally eats from those chop houses and pie shops in that dreadful East End. As for Percy, he’s probably been eating the same unwholesome fare while Beattie’s away, so I considered it my Christian duty to ensure that two members of my family were properly fed for once. Shall we take tea in the sitting room?’

  ‘Actually,’ Percy replied diplomatically, ‘I rather feel the need for a walk around the garden after all that goodness. Would you care to join me, Jack?’ he added in what sounded more like a command than a suggestion.

  Jack murmured his assent, shot Esther a reassuring look and got up from the table. As he did so, Constance turned to Lucy and indicated with a jerk of her head that she should also make herself scarce. This left just Constance and Esther to walk through to the sitting room and take armchairs facing each other while Alice left off clearing the lunch table and fussed around the low table between them with the tea things.

  Once Alice had bowed out again, Constance fixed Esther with a firm stare and opened up. ‘Esther, would you be so good as to answer me a few questions?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Esther replied nervously, ‘always assuming that I know the answers.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll know the answers to these questions, let me assure you,’ Constance replied. ‘First of all, would I be correct in stating that you are Jewish by birth?’

  ‘Yes,’ Esther confirmed apprehensively.

  ‘And from where did your ancestors originate?’

  ‘As far as I’ve been told, from somewhere called Lithuania. I believe it to be near Russia, but my father was only a young boy when they were forced to flee and he had little memory of the place where he was born.’

  ‘But, despite his unfortunate background, he built up a successful business — cloth importation, as I recall you telling me during our last meeting.’

  ‘That’s right. Then he was killed, along with my mother, and the business had to be sold.’

  ‘And you then went into garment manufacture?’

  ‘Well, the people who sort of adopted me had such a business, yes.’

  ‘And that is how you acquired your undoubted skills with needle and thread?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that is how you now earn your living?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In short, you are a seamstress?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘And from what I can gather from the little that I have been able to wheedle out of Jackson and his uncle, you are currently residing in a common lodging house in Spitalfields?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s one of the respectable ones,’ Esther insisted, feeling more uncomfortable with each question.

  ‘So, if you were to marry Jackson, you would enjoy a considerable improvement in material comfort and living conditions?’

  Esther had finally reached the boundaries of the politeness to which she considered her hostess to be entitled. Her face set as she replied. ‘First of all, you should know that your son has never once mentioned marriage, let alone proposed it to me. Secondly, be advised that were I to marry Jack it would be for love and not for material advancement. And finally, I am proud of who I am and who my parents were and I feel no shame in having survived for six years by my own hard work and skills, without resorting to thieving, drinking or hawking my body in the street as a common prostitute. So while I may not be good enough for your dear son, neither am I an adventuress or an imposter. I imagine that this concludes our conversation — would you like me to leave now?’

  Constance’s face broke into a wide smile as she shook her head. ‘On the contrary, I wish you to marry Jackson. My questions were designed only to assess your honesty. It’s obvious to anyone that you and Jackson are very deeply attached to each other and I simply wanted to protect him from being seduced by your beauty into making a totally inappropriate match, in which love came a very poor second to social ambition.’

  Esther rose from her armchair, red in the face and glared down at Constance.

  ‘Gratifying though it is to have passed the mother-in-law test, Jack has yet to ask for my hand in marriage. If — and when — he does, I shall be obliged to decline, in case there is any lingering doubt in his mind regarding the genuineness of my love for him, as there so obviously was in yours. Good day, Mrs Enright, and thank you once again for the lunch.’

  She bustled out of the sitting room, down the hallway and through the kitchen, past a startled cook who was sitting with her feet up, enjoying a cup of tea with Alice. Once in the back garden Esther stormed up to where Jack stood talking with his uncle and demanded that Jack take her home.

  ‘Why?’ Jack demanded, completely nonplussed by the look on her face that he had never seen before.

  ‘I’ll tell you on the way home,’ Esther advised him with grim determination. ‘Or if you prefer, I’ll take off by myself and leave you with your dear Mama.’

  ‘Best go with her, Jack,’ Percy advised him. ‘A young lady like her might not be safe on a train alone, these days.’

  It took Jack all his effort to keep up with Esther as she steamed down Church Lane with her head down, fighting back tears of anger, humiliation and disappointment.

  ‘What on earth did Mother say to upset you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Ask her yourself!’ Esther spat back.

  ‘I can’t, can I, since we’re heading back into the City?’

  ‘Just leave it alone,’ she demanded.

  ‘How can I leave it alone?’ Jack protested. ‘My mother has obviously said something that didn’t agree with you and I need to know what it was, if we’re to continue seeing each other.’

  Esther stopped suddenly and glared angrily into Jack’s face as the first tears broke free and rolled down her reddened cheeks. ‘She more or less called me a whore on the make! A scheming hussy using her feminine charms to seduce her precious boy. A Jewish seamstress with ideas above her true station in life. Well, neither of you need worry on that score, believe me! See me safely home, then we’re finished, Jack Enright!’

  ‘I’m still not convinced that we’ve got these last two in the right order,’ Reid complained to Percy Enright as they stood outside St. George's Vestry Hall, Cable Street, in which the Coroner for South East Middlesex, Wynne Baxter, who had presided over the inquests into the deaths of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman, was about to do the same in respect of the death of Elizabeth Stride outside the club in Berner Street.

  ‘Since Catherine Eddowes is a City cas
e, Baxter has no authority over that, at least,’ Enright observed, to which Reid snorted by way of reply.

  ‘That won’t stop the blabbering old fool playing to the gallery, inflaming the newspaper columnists and causing panic in the streets’ he added. ‘Anyway, best go in and do what we can to hose things down.’

  He was to be bitterly justified in his gloomy prediction that the press would have a field day. It was October 1st, the first day of the inquest, and the evidence of the first few witnesses was formal and uncontroversial. It established the discovery of Stride’s body in the gateway to the club, still warm, at approximately 1 am, and the fact that no-one had seen or heard anything. It was then realised that there had been no formal identification of the deceased and the inquest was adjourned until the following day.

  On that second day, as he had been on the previous day, Reid was sitting with the coroner, assisting with the acquisition of evidence from the various witnesses, the third of whom tearfully confirmed that the remains she had viewed at the mortuary had been those of her sister, Elizabeth Stride, and that she had been leading a somewhat irregular life, prone to bouts of drunkenness and living from time to time with different men. Then it was the turn of Constable Lamb of ‘H’ Division, who had been called to the body when it was first discovered and who had sent for the police surgeon. The second day concluded with more witnesses who confirmed the deceased’s irregular lifestyle in one doss house after another, her fondness for alcohol and the fact that she had lived with several men during her forty odd years. The most recent of these, Michael Kidney, became involved in a heated exchange with Reid when he criticised the inability of the police to take immediate steps to apprehend the offender, whose identity Kidney implied that he might know, although he obstinately declined to disclose it to the coroner.

  It was day three before Dr Phillips was called to give his formal report, to the effect that cause of death was the cutting of the throat, which would have rendered the victim dead almost immediately. There were no other wounds on the body and in Dr Phillips’s opinion the body had not been moved to where it had been found. Put succinctly, Elizabeth Stride had been attacked without warning, she had been pushed to the ground and her throat had been slashed where she lay, which was where she had been found. The fatal act would only have taken seconds and in response to a specific question from the coroner, Phillips testified that the severance of the carotid artery in this case was totally unlike like the similar outrage inflicted on Annie Chapman.

  Here we go, Reid told himself. The idiot’s trying to tie all these together as the work of one man. Unfortunately, he may be right.

  The next witness seemed destined to prove precisely that. A local man, William Marshall, testified to having seen the deceased, some forty-five minutes prior to the estimated time of her death, across the road from the club talking to a middle aged man wearing a peaked cap ‘something like what a sailor would wear.’ He was about five feet six inches in height, rather stout in build and decently dressed. Marshall did not see his face and could not say whether or not he had any facial hair, or whether or not he was carrying anything. The couple were kissing from time to time and he heard the man tell the deceased: ‘You would say anything but your prayers,’ in reply to which the woman had laughed. Then, just to confuse matters, another police officer testified to having seen the same couple in precisely the same place, but testified that the man had been wearing a deerstalker hat and carrying a parcel approximately 18 inches long and 8 inches broad.

  Reid was then called to testify to the course of the police enquiries which had led to the location of the witnesses who had testified, but had taken them no closer to identifying the offender. ‘The investigation is still going on. Every endeavour is being made to arrest the assassin, but up to present without success,’ he added.

  It was 23rd October before the inquest was concluded and Wynne Baxter could not resist widening his concluding remarks to well outside the matter for the consideration of the jury when he concluded that: ‘There was no skilful mutilation as in the cases of Nichols and Chapman and no unskilful injuries, as in the case in Mitre Square. This is possibly the work of an imitator; but there was the same skill exhibited in the way in which the victim had been entrapped and the injuries inflicted, so as to cause instant death and prevent blood from soiling the operator and the same daring defiance of immediate detection, which, unfortunately for the peace of the inhabitants and trade of the neighbourhood, has hitherto been only too successful. Speaking for myself, I am sorry that the time and attention which you, the jury, have given to the case has not produced a result that would be a perceptible relief to the metropolis — the detection of the criminal; but I am bound to acknowledge the great attention which Inspector Reid and the police have given to the case. I leave it to you, the jury, to say, how, when, and by what means the deceased came by her death.’

  As if wishing to waste no further time on the matter, the jury brought in the inescapable verdict of ‘wilful murder against some person or persons unknown.’

  If this was meant to reassure those who had to live and work in the locality, it was a dismal failure. The following day, when local residents read that the police had still got no further in their efforts to identify the savage responsible for cleansing the immediate streets of prostitutes with the aid of a sharp knife, they formed an unruly mob in Berner Street, which took half the available constabulary shift to disperse as they stood braying about the incompetence of the Metropolitan Police in general and ‘H’ Division in particular. When ordered to move on, the more vociferous of those who had been protesting withdrew to a local pub and formed themselves into the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, committed to patrolling the dark alleyways by night and dealing in their own way with anyone they found who might be the culprit.

  The President of this newly self-appointed Committee, George Lusk, was the one selected to receive, by post in a small cardboard box, what proved to be half a human kidney, the other half of which the sender, who boasted that he came ‘from Hell’, claimed to have fried and eaten. It was quickly passed on to the authorities and a Dr Openshaw, after conducting comparison tests on the remaining kidney from Catherine Eddowes’ corpse, concluded that the two were ‘very similar.’ Given the information that was already being conveyed to the public by the reporters attending the inquest into the death of Catherine Eddowes, this was not destined to ease the minds of those who were looking carefully all around as they passed from one pool of gaslight to another in the fog-wreathed streets of Whitechapel that Autumn.

  This second inquest had commenced on 4th October and was being conducted by the City Coroner, S.F. Langham. The first witness, Catherine’s sister, tearfully confirmed the victim’s identity and John Kelly told the jury of his seven years living with her in Cooney’s Lodging House in Flower and Dean Street and her disappearance on the day prior to her death, ostensibly to visit her daughter in Bermondsey. Later witnesses would tell of her insensible state when found lying drunk in High Street, Aldgate, and her four or so hours in police custody in Bishopsgate Police Station before her release only thirty minutes before the estimated time of her death.

  Constable Watkins described how he found the deceased lying on her back in a pool of blood, with ‘her clothes thrown up’, as he tactfully described it, her throat cut and her stomach ripped open. He was insistent that only fourteen minutes had elapsed since he had last walked past the same spot and seen no body. Inspector Collard then described the subsequent processes of summoning the police surgeon, removing the body to the mortuary, conducting enquiries in the local streets and securing Mitre Square against the prurient eyes of curious spectators. He also made brief reference to the finding, by a Metropolitan Police constable, of the piece of apron in Goulston Street.

  The ‘star’ witness on that first day was police surgeon Dr Frederick Brown, who testified to having called in Dr Phillips from the Met, on account of his familiarity with the previous corpse of Annie Chapman.
Death would, Dr Brown testified, have been immediate, as the result of the slashing of the throat. Then it was on to the nauseating details discovered during the post-mortem.

  All but a small portion of the victim’s uterus had been cut away and it, along with the left kidney, were completely missing by the time that the body had been undressed and prepared for dissection in the mortuary. Despite not being specifically asked, he added that, ‘The way the kidney was cut out showed that it was done by somebody who knew what he was about,’ although there was no obvious professional use for a spare organ such as a kidney. He opined that the entire process might have taken no more than five minutes and — again somewhat gratuitously — he added, ‘I see no reason to doubt that it was the work of one man,’ and that the face had been mutilated ‘to disfigure the corpse.’

  That was the end of the evidence on that first day, but at the resumed inquest a week later, Dr Brown, when invited to do so, expressed the opinion that the atrocities had been inflicted in the place where the body had been found and there could be no question of its having been carried to that spot and dumped.

  After several local residents testified to having heard no noise, suspicious or otherwise, from Mitre Square in the early hours of the morning of the discovery of the body, it was the turn of witness Lawende to give his evidence. He testified of having seen the deceased at the Church Passage entrance to Mitre Square shortly after one thirty in the morning, in the company of a man who looked ‘rather rough and shabby’ and was wearing a peaked cloth cap. He confirmed that he had given a fuller description to the police, but any unsatisfied curiosity that the jury might have experienced regarding the man’s identity was rapidly overtaken by the most controversial evidence of all, despite its only marginal evidential value. It was a strong illustration of the desire of the City Police to distance themselves from the mounting criticism of the bumbling ineptitude of their Metropolitan counterparts and it was to do with the portion of once-white and now blood-smeared, apron found in Goulston Street and confirmed as having come from the remaining section of apron still on Catherine Eddowes’ body when it was discovered. But it had less to do with the apron portion and more to do with what had been discovered along with it.