Castle Rouge (9 page)

“Vaguely. Promotes a bunch of lurid poppycock, if you ask me.”

“How well you put it, Watson. Then you do not think his lurid poppycock is even worth the denouncing.”

“We can discuss it, Holmes, once we are out of this dreadful place. I can certainly see how the Ripper was able to slink among these ill-lit byways and pounce upon his victims, then disappear, if that is what you brought me here to see.”

“I brought you here to see what I could not see.”

“There is nothing you cannot see.”

“Exactly. I would be obliged if you would wander ’mongst the lost and the damned for a while longer. We can have a warming toddy back in Baker Street and compare notes.”

“It will take more than a toddy to erase this stink from our nostrils.”

“At least we can leave the vicinity and its foulnesses far behind. That is more than its residents can achieve. Ah.” He stopped to stare at an unprepossessing brick building of four stories before us. “The International Working Men’s Educational Club. It was near here that I so deserted sense and chased the wrong quarry. Now we are getting somewhere.”

“Holmes, I am sure that any man would have made the same mistake.”

“Ah, but I am not any man. Stand with me here by the road and let us dissect that abominable evening. It was nearly one of the clock. The club’s front door, which you see there, was locked, but that gateway at the side was open, and led through a small yard to a rear entrance, so residents could come and go as they needed.”

“Is this a legitimate club, Holmes?”

I saw a sickle-moon of smile in the dim lamplight. “It is not secretly a house of ill repute, Watson, unless you count Socialism as a social ill and they would say they are only here to reform social ills. Yes, it is what is said, and I have the rabbi’s word on that, for what little credit he gives the young revolutionaries that assemble here, as you heard from his own lips.”

“A wise man.”

“That is what the title means, I believe, although arcane religious matters of any stripe are far beyond my ken. At any rate, I had taken a post opposite the club, in disguise of course.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because a number of the early suspects were Jews. This is a central point where men of that race come and go. And after two murders that had particularly captured the public imagination, not to mention the usual string of women murdered in the district months and years before, I noted that the murders of Mary Ann Nicholls and Annie Chapman had occurred in a certain progression of dates. It seemed some pattern underlay the attacks.”

“You were following a wild guess, admit it, Holmes!”

“I was following my own logic.” He drew deeply on his pipe before speaking again. “I will admit that there are some few areas in which I am personally deficient and that they probably intersected here, to my chagrin and to the death of that woman, Elizabeth Stride. Chagrin, I am convinced, falls far lower on St. Peter’s list of failings than unnecessary death. It is lucky that I do not believe in such postmortem fairy tales.”

I did not know what to say. I had seen Holmes perplexed, Holmes afire with the hunt, Holmes triumphant. I had never seen Holmes humble, and I suspected that this was as close as I would ever come in my lifetime.

He gazed at the street opposite. “No woman killed in Whitechapel, Watson, during or before or after the Ripper’s reign, was seen with so many men of varying appearance as Elizabeth Stride, this forty-four-year-old unfortunate who was missing two front teeth. I saw her with one myself, though I don’t believe I can afford to discount the earlier men who crossed her path, some quite intimately, according to witnesses. From the testimony, there was a cordiality to the encounters that quite surprises me. Perhaps you can explain.”

“It is a game, Holmes. The woman pretends interest in the man, she flatters and flirts. What she wants is the coins that will ease her life for a few hours, whether spent on beer or a bed indoors at a doss house. Usually she is so drunk she scarce knows what she is doing. So is he.”

“A fine advertisement for such transactions, Watson. I have seen more personal interchanges in an opium den.”

“Both parties in such exchanges are benighted, miserable souls, Holmes. All the world knows that. Still, the great cities of that world support ten thousands of prostitutes and many times more men to patronize them. It is a ritual as old as earth.”

“No doubt why those stars and moons and planets keep such a wide berth of our own globe. Take yourself back to that night of twenty-nine September last year, Watson. By sometime between 7:00 and 8:00
P.M.
Elizabeth Stride had earned sixpence through some cleaning work. She planned further and more profitable expeditions, for she borrowed a clothes brush from Charles Preston, a barber, and left a piece of velvet with Catharine Lane, a charwoman, two friends she encountered at Flower and Dean Street.

“By 11:00
P.M.
, two laborers saw her lingering with a man outside the Bricklayer’s Arms pub in Settle Street as they entered. They were surprised that the couple were hugging and kissing in the open. The man was too respectably dressed for such behavior: smart black morning suit and coat, billycock hat, black mustache, about five-foot-five.”

I nodded, seeing the picture painted like a scene in a play.

“The workmen couldn’t resist taunting the woman. The man with her, they teased, resembled Leather Apron.”

“Leather Apron! Good God, Holmes, quite a chilling fellow. He was one of the earliest suspects in the Ripper murders.”

“One of the earliest and the least likely, save that he had all the earmarks of a suspect made to order for the press to convict in print, which they are even better at than Scotland Yard detectives are at letting the guilty go. Although, in this instance, I behaved remarkably like Scotland Yard’s finest,” he finished bitterly.

Holmes would indeed be chagrined with himself for committing the same blunders for which he so often berailed officialdom.

“This man did appear in the streets in a Leather Apron and when arrested was found to keep several nasty knives at home, was he not?” I asked.

“Indeed. He was a bootmaker, hence the apron and possibly the long knives at home. He bullied the ladies of the night, no doubt, and was Jewish. Worst of all, his name was Jack. Jack Pizer. He was the sort of neighborhood bogeyman that the police and press could wish for, a ‘crazy Jew’ to throw to the mob and the police courts, with a nickname created to terrify women and children in their beds,” Holmes finished almost contemptuously.

“I can’t deny that I would seize upon such a name for a story of mine.”

“Of yours, or of mine?” Holmes asked acidly.

“Of…yours, of course. All stories of mine are…yours.”

“
Hmmm
. Not as flattering as you might think, Watson. I distinctly forbid you to concoct any ‘story’ of this case. It is too awful to perpetuate in all its gory glory. At any rate, too much time has already been wasted on Leather Apron. But back to twenty-nine September, 1888. Sometime before midnight, Matthew Packer sold fruit to a man and a woman from his front room at forty-four Berner Street.”

“Next-door to the murder site we now stand near!”

“Indeed so, Watson. No one is more quickly attuned to the nuances of street addresses than a doctor who is called out frequently in the night. In this instance I detect a clear superiority to the mere olfactory skills of Toby the bloodhound.”

I knew that if I could view Holmes by a paraffin lamp I would see the twinkle in his eye as he so gently paid me back for my peevish complaint of a while previous in Baker Street.

“Poor old Packer!” he went on. “His testimony wavered like his aged hand. Although he identified the woman as Long Liz and described a man of thirty to five-and-thirty years as her companion, a dark-favored man of medium height, it remains a questionable sighting.”

Holmes drew deeply on the pipe, expelling enough smoke for a miniature steam engine before he continued. He turned and looked down the street.

“The next witness is the only one to have heard a soon-to-be-dead woman speak. He was William Marshall, another laborer, and he was standing outside of his lodgings at sixty-four Berner Street when he noticed a couple standing outside next door. He remarked that neither appeared to be drunk but that the couple kissed. This appears to have been common behavior in the neighborhood. He reports that the man—middle-aged, stout, and clean-shaven, about five-foot-six—commented “You would say anything except your prayers,” then walked the woman down the street toward Dutfield’s yard.” Holmes nodded to the gate across the way from us.

“It sounds as if he knew her, Holmes! That is an accusation, and people seldom accuse strangers.”

“Apparently, however, there are no strangers in Whitechapel, with all the willy-nilly kissing.”

“Was there anything unusual about this last man, other than his age? The other suspects have been decidedly below five-and-thirty, and I assume middle age refers to five-and-forty, or fifty or so.”

“Yes, I find this fellow of particular interest and not only for the cryptic quality of his remark. He was quietly, clerkishly dressed: cutaway coat, dark trousers, peaked cap; nothing that would attract attention, although the nautical touch of the peaked cap is out of character and strangely sinister.”

“Do you think so, Holmes?”

He shrugged and sucked upon the pipe stem again. I had the sense that I had just proven my only human intuitions again but could not see how or where.

“There was, however, a disappointing lack of facial description because William Marshall did not see it, no doubt because of an excess of kissing.”

“Holmes, a kiss in Whitechapel is like a handshake elsewhere in London. It begins a bargain instead of seals it.”

“I can only rejoice that I have been spared making that bargain. The clock is moving toward my appearance on the scene. It is now half-past twelve and Long Liz Stride, all five-foot-two of her, is still making herself puzzlingly public on the street. PC William Smith notes on his rounds that about where we keep watch now, Watson, opposite where her body would be discovered an hour later, a man and woman stood. He identified the woman as Stride, but was the first to notice a red flower on her jacket.”

“And I suppose it is some damned different fellow with her.”

“Ha!” Had we been at home in Baker Street, Holmes would have leaped up and begun pacing with excitement. “Five-foot-seven, Watson. Eight-and-twenty years old—note the precision of the professional observer—dark complexion, dark mustache; wearing a black diagonal cutaway coat, hard felt hat, white collar and tie.”

“More than smart, a dandy.”

“And carrying a parcel wrapped in newsprint six-to-eight-inches wide and eighteen-inches long.”

“Well. Holmes, that was not fish and chips.”

“No, Watson, that was not fish and chips. It was, in fact, the exact size and shape of a collection of knives useful for some impromptu street surgery, would you not say?”

“I’d say so more surely could I see the contents. It might have contained only…kitchen utensils.”

“Ah yes, a man might feel an urgent need to purchase such items to carry through all the kissing corridors of Whitechapel in the dark of night. What is interesting is that a resident who passed this location at virtually the same hour saw nothing.”

I mused upon this. “There is the gate beside the International Working Men’s Educational Club. The couple could have ducked in there to transact business the moment PC Smith vanished.”

Holmes nodded approval. “Just the sort of quick-witted insight on such matters I expected of you, Watson. However within five or ten minutes at 12:35 or 12:40, an innocent young man named Morris Eagle returned from seeing his lady friend home. I cannot tell you how encouraged I am, Watson, that such customs as seeing lady friends home do still occur in Whitechapel. He found the club’s front door locked because of the lateness of the hour and went through the side gate. He strolled the length of the passage and saw no one. There vanishes the possible escape route of the couple seen earlier, Watson.”

I gazed up and down the street, seeking another byway they could have nipped into.

“However,” Holmes said, “Mr. Eagle admitted it was very dark, and he could have missed seeing someone in the passage. At any rate,” he added casually, “I took up my post immediately after Mr. Eagle had passed, for I never saw him. And almost immediately, the street became a carnival again. I had arranged myself almost invisibly in this very spot when I looked up to see she who would shortly be identified as the dead body of Elizabeth Stride standing by Dutfield gateway. I have no idea how she came there. None! Even as I watched, a man came along the street and paused to talk to her. He was not
any
of the men witnesses would describe as having dallied with her previously.”

“This is indeed a conundrum, Holmes.”

“And this man was not the only stroller. Immediately another came by. The woman was wearing the red flower pinned to her black jacket that other witnesses mentioned. I saw it. The light is strong enough here for such details to leap into relief. Then events exploded into action.”

I was now rapt in Holmes’s story. Standing here in the dark and the damp, under the thin rays of the mist-shrouded street lamp made me feel the presence of the many people who had passed by here that night eight months ago. I could smell the dusky scent of mildew and the greasy miasma of pub food. Was it cooking grease that spotted the newsprint wrapping the last man’s odd-shaped bundle…or blood? For a physician, I have an active imagination I try to disguise, but as a fictioneer my blood roars at the hint of a ripping good story!

I know that Holmes most distrusts this tendency in me, so I keep it sternly leashed. He continued his tale.

“This latest man with Stride was five-foot-five, thirty, dark hair, fair skin, small brown mustache. He was full in the face as a moon yet broad in the shoulders, like a laborer. He wore dark coat and trousers and peaked hat. He tried to pull the woman down into the street but managed only to spin her and cast her down on the footpath.