Castle Rouge (17 page)

Despite the portrait being handdrawn, the eyes had the wide, staring look found in some photographs. Otherwise, that was the only sign that the subject was quite mad.

The ticketmaster’s callused finger poked at the celluloid protecting Kelly’s face. “I saw a fellow like that. Your brother, you say? He had no money for a ticket, but insisted he must reach Frankfurt as soon as possible.”

“Oh, Hortense!” Irene sighed heavily. “Henry has been gambling again! And after he promised our mother…. Sir, I apologize for my brother’s behavior. If you can guess where he might have gone, we will find him and pay his way.”

“Gone?” He regarded us as if we were the mad killers. “He’s gone all right. To Frankfurt. Yesterday evening. He may have won the price of a ticket gambling, for he paid the entire fare with a fistful of coppers.”

Irene nodded slowly while I shut the cabinet on James Kelly’s loathsome face, but only temporarily.

No doubt that was what had become of the dead flower girl’s hard-earned coppers: a ticket for James Kelly to another city he could terrorize.

While I reflected bitterly on this fact, Irene purchased two tickets for Frankfurt leaving within the half hour.

“Looks like that brother of yours keeps one step ahead of you,” the ticketmaster noted, “and of his promises to his mother, too.”

We stepped away from the window to one of the hard wooden benches strung along the platform, and sat.

The wind was chill. I heard a faint cry of “Flowers” on it. The smell of spiced nuts trailed from the chestnut vendor’s stand some fifty feet away.

“Do you need a comfort station before we continue?” Irene asked. For a former prima donna she was unusually practical at times.

I sat beside her. “There is no comfort station on this journey.”

She did not argue.

12.

Cork and Candle

Halifax is built of stone,
Heptonstall o’ stone,
I’ Halifax ther’s bonny lassis,
I’ Heptonstall ther’s none
.

—
OLD CHILDREN’S RHYME

FROM THE NOTES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M. D.

A veteran of foreign wars like myself should not have been rattled by the swift arrival of the police and the even swifter removal of the pitiful yet breathing body under my care into the custody of the ambulance men.

Yet I was shocked beyond anything the chaos of combat had ever accomplished. Certainly I was loath to give up my patient, but the authorities were as rough with me as with any of the gawkers who soon gathered to murmur and bruit about the name of Jack the Ripper.

It was even more shocking when a pair of bobbies said I had to wait for the inspector and made clear that my medical title was only a liability at this time on this scene.

I couldn’t even resort to the sometimes magical name of Sherlock Holmes, although with the police it was less of an “open sesame” than with other authorities in London. These were not even the London police, for Whitechapel had its own (and I might add, remarkably thickheaded) force.

So I fretted in that dark yard now lit by a constellation of lanterns, watching the cobblestones suffer under the boots of enough policemen to have Holmes crying to heaven at the stupidity of it all.

Holmes. Where was he? The police had come, presumably because he had found and warned a bobby on patrol. I had heard their shrill whistles calling to each other like hysterical birds, but nothing more of Holmes.

“And you say your name is Dr. Watson, sir?”

“I don’t say it. That is my name. Dr. Watson of Paddington.”

“A long way from Paddington, sir, at such a late hour. Does your wife know you’re about?”

“Of course she does! A doctor is often called out at night on cases.”

“Convenient, ’tisn’t it, sir? What case brought you out tonight, all the way to Whitechapel?”

“Not a case of mine, exactly.”

“No?”

“A case of a friend of mine’s.”

“Who is?”

“Not here at the moment.”

“But he was here before?”

“Yes, of course. We found the poor woman together.”

“Did you now? And where is he, did you say?”

“I didn’t say. I sent him to alert you lot, while I attended to the…patient.”

“But you said it was his case.”

“Yes, well…but he isn’t a doctor.”

“Then how can he have ‘cases’?”

“Ah, really, you are wasting your time, and these men are completely trampling the ground, destroying any evidence that might remain!”

At that moment I heard the report of a pistol in the distance.

My interrogation paused as every helmet in the vicinity lifted to gauge the distance and the caliber of the shot.

I desperately feared it was my old Army Adams, a sturdy, accurate and noisy firearm.

“Holmes!” I burst out, fearing for his life.

“Holmes? That is the name of your accomplice?”

“Blast it, man! Of course not. I am speaking of no accomplice, but of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective. Surely you have heard of him.”

“Can’t say that I have,” rejoined the stolid, cockney voice of PC Whoever.

I groaned. “I must speak with Inspector Lestrade.”

“Is this someone else you expect us to know?”

“Of Scotland Yard,” I finished with the ringing conviction of a desperate man.

“Lestrade is coming,” a familiar yet authoritatively strident voice announced. “And so is this sorry fellow I trapped six streets over in a yard as dark and hidden as this one.”

Holmes, his face smudged with grime and the occasional darkening bruise, hauled a scowling, blinking, cringing figure into the lantern light.

I had never been so glad of seeing such a likely looking villain in my life. I meant the man in Holmes’s custody, of course.

Our return to Baker Street was, thankfully, in such a wee hour that it was not observed by Mrs. Hudson. I shudder to think what that worthy Scots lady would think of Holmes’s profligate ways with the condition of his clothing.

My vigil by the wounded young woman while waiting for the police and ambulance to come and take her away and Holmes’s pursuit of his quarry had done nothing for either of our appearances.

Holmes insisted that Inspector Lestrade, who had finally arrived on the scene and grandly dismissed us as both suspects and witnesses, would send for us when the poor girl was able to speak and would interview us then. Until that time, we could only find our weary way home. I stopped to wire Mary not to worry, for I could see no sense in making for Paddington when I’d so soon be needed in town again.

I must say that we both trudged up the stairs to 221B silent and solemn.

Holmes left me in the parlor setting out the foreign forms of the shot glasses on his chemistry table while he retired to his bedchamber to remove the blighted articles. To me these glassy artifacts seemed like remnants of another time now that a woman and her assailant had been found, but not to my ever-curious friend Sherlock Holmes.

In moments Holmes returned in his favorite mouse-colored dressing gown, humming happily off-key while putting his pipe-smoking kit together beside the Persian slipper on the mantel.

“It appears that I will have that most rare opportunity granted to few mortals, Watson,” he noted.

“What is that, Holmes?”

“A chance to interview a victim of the Ripper…or a purported victim of some lust-murderer, at least. Not to mention a suspect for the Ripper himself. I am glad you were along last night, old fellow, not the least for your medical skills. This time I have a witness to my innocent appearance on the scene! What did you think of Whitechapel?”

“A hole, a filthy hole. I knew as much, but to see it in person reminds me of the Black Hole of Calcutta of legendary repute.”

“Unfortunately all of Whitechapel could answer to that epithet, Watson. As long as civilized nations allow such sinkholes of poverty, despair, and neglect to exist, crime will have a field day. Crime, not mere puzzles, Watson, not the intricate interplay of greed and vengeance and jealousy that have brought me some of my most perplexing cases, but crude, raw, brutal crime. Murder most inexplicable and savage.”

“Yet you seem to think that these case studies of Krafft-Ebing shed some light on such senseless murders as Jack the Ripper’s.”

My comment plunged my friend into one of his gloomy reveries.

His thin cheeks bellowed in and out as he inhaled on the black briarwood pipe until the tobacco truly took, and the pipe began to exhale smoke like a fire-breathing dragon.

“‘Case studies,’” he quoted back at me finally. “A doctor’s expression, and quite rightly so, yet such an appalling admission. It turns Jack the Ripper—and James Kelly and Sweeney Todd and Bluebeard, if you will—from a singular demon into a simple if noxious mania common to more than one man. Does one really fancy one solves anything by seeing Rippers produced in endless links like strings of sausage?”

“I know about the legends of Bluebeard and Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, but who is James Kelly? You promised earlier to tell me his story.”

Holmes cast himself into the velvet-lined chair as if craving its cradling softness. His eyes lit up with the joy of contemplating an enigma.

“A demon upholsterer, if you will, Watson. A miserable man from the miserable manufacturing and port city of Liverpool. A bastard, quite literally. Yet a happy boy bound to the upholstery trade with no greater ambitions than that.

“Then one day he discovers he has great expectations. It seems his father is not dead but a successful merchant who has left young James a tidy sum in his will. Of course, that only makes him a well-provided-for bastard. His lifelong love for his mother turns to hate. Then he is severed from his beloved trade and given the golden opportunity of being sent to school, for him a prison not a boon. One revelation, and not only his entire life changes but also his feeling toward his fellow man…and woman, especially, as a certain person of my acquaintance would remind me rather sharply, were she here.”

“Are you referring rather coyly to my wife, Mary, Holmes?”

Holmes must have inhaled rather too deeply of his pipe; he coughed violently for at least a minute. I was forced to rush to him and apply a few sharp slaps to the back before he recovered.

“You do see what I mean, Watson? That Krafft-Ebing and his book make mice of monsters?”

“I suppose so. It must go back to our days of childhood tales, when we believed bogeymen actually hid in the wardrobe or beneath the bed. An uncaught killer like Jack the Ripper begins to take on the power of a legend. To realize that he might be only a pathetic maniac, ill-educated as well as ignorant, religiously deluded, and not so much clever as lucky…well, what would the papers have to write about?”

“The papers have made the Ripper, as have our imaginations. So, Watson, take your ignorant, deluded maniac and multiply him by many. That is what Krafft-Ebbing would have us all believe. Such men prowl every city, usually acting separately but joined by a common impulse and a common method of following it: bloody murder.”

Holmes set down his pipe and rose. “Such men are often dipsomaniacs, according to Kraft-Ebbing, acting during some drunken nightmare. Certainly James Kelly drank. Hence my interest in bottle corks.”

I followed Holmes to the table, where he was separating the three shot glasses into a single line, rather like the shells in those street games involving hidden nuts.

“A piece of cork and two pieces of wax. Not much to lead us to Jack the Ripper. Yet this trail may lead us to the source of all his evil. Imagine. Jack the Ripper hung on a bit of cork and sealing wax.”

“Sealing wax? But you described the wax from the cellar floor as coming from candles.”

“Some of it did. But this, this pale bit….”

Holmes’s tongs elevated a slender curl the size and texture of the half-moon tip on an infant’s fingernail.

“This is not candle wax but sealing wax, and if it doesn’t lead me to Jack the Ripper here in London, it will certainly lead me to the unholy coven that turned
le tout Paris
into an abattoir in the supposedly merry month of May.”

I don’t know which shocked me the most: to hear Sherlock Holmes declaim a French phrase like a Parisian born, or to learn that he suspected Jack the Ripper of moving on, and of collecting followers.

13.

Twixt Heaven and Hell

At length the slight quivering of an eyelid, and immediately thereupon, an electric shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood in torrents from the temples to the heart. And now me first positive effort to think. And the first endeavor to remember
.

—
EDGAR ALLAN POE,
THE PREMATURE BURIAL

Darkness and motion.