Lestrade and the Ripper Read online

‘And they led us ’ere, sir. To the park.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we lost ’em, sir. If anything’s ’appened to them dogs, I’ll never forgive myself.’ He blew his nose, like a foghorn in the morning.

  ‘Don’t take on, Woodhouse, we’ll find them. Dry your eyes, there’s a good fellow.’

  Lestrade groped his way forward, tangling with gorse and briar as he did so. There was a female shriek off to his left.

  ‘Chief Inspector Abberline?’ he called, but there was no response.

  ‘Er . . .’ The grey figure of Rodney loomed out of the grey mist. No wonder he had been so difficult to find.

  ‘Mr Rodney, sir, I came as quickly as I could.’

  ‘Er . . .’ Rodney deafened Lestrade by bellowing through his loud-hailer at him. ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. It’s . . . er . . .’

  ‘Lestrade, sir,’ the Inspector said resignedly.

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. I telegrammed you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Let’s see, now. You’re on a case in Nottingham.’

  ‘Northampton, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I thought it was. In a hospital. Patients being murdered.’

  ‘A school, sir.’

  ‘Quite so. Well, I must take you off it, Gregson.’

  ‘Lestrade, sir.’

  ‘Yes. I must take you off it because we have a new chappie . . .’ He pointed skyward.

  ‘. . . hiding in the trees?’ Lestrade did his best to be helpful.

  ‘Upstairs in the Yard,’ Rodney confided.

  ‘In Special Branch?’ Lestrade tried to follow the drift.

  ‘You’re obsessed with trees, Jones.’

  ‘Lestrade, sir.’

  ‘Anderson.’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘His name is Anderson. Dr Robert Anderson. He takes over from . . . er . . .’

  ‘Sir Charles?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sir Charles Warren?’

  ‘Yes. Quite. He’s in Switzerland at the moment.’

  ‘Sir Charles?’

  ‘No, Dr Robert. Really, Abberline, do try and concentrate. Life is difficult enough as it is. Dr Robert is in Switzerland for the good of his health. Dicky lungs.’

  ‘Who’s that, sir?’

  ‘No, no. That’s his complaint. Asthma. Anyway, he’s moving to Paris shortly to be nearer the scene of the crime. Any questions?’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘What?’ Rodney did not suffer fools gladly.

  ‘Why have I been summoned, sir?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’ Bearing in mind the night he had had, Lestrade was a model of patience.

  ‘Dr Robert wants all the men he can get. The City’s in hysterics, Gregson. It’s pandemonium. Abberline has arrested over a hundred men.’

  ‘He thinks it’s a conspiracy, does he, sir?’

  ‘No need to be flippant, Jones. Her Majesty Herself has asked for you.’

  ‘Really?’ Even Lestrade was impressed.

  ‘But don’t let it go to your head. She’d be bound to remember you. Abberline is an unusual name.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Lestrade hoped Rodney wouldn’t notice his knuckles whitening in the morning air.

  Horrible howls and savagings echoed through the swirling fog.

  ‘I believe the dogs have found Chief Inspector Abberline, sir,’ said Lestrade. ‘I’d know that strangled cry anywhere. Shall we?’

  In another part of the field, two gentlemen, one in a Donegal and wide-awake, the other in tawdry harlot’s rags, crouched in the bushes. ‘Did you have to scream like that, Holmes?’ one of them asked.

  ‘I must stay in character, Watson,’ the harlot answered. ‘It is essential to the very core of my being.’

  ‘But you’ve been dressing as a lady now for nearly a month,’ Watson hissed. ‘I believe you’re secretly enjoying it.’

  ‘Nonsense, Watson. I scarcely feel any thrill at all at the tightness of my bodice. Besides, I fear we are wasting our time here as surely as Abberline is.’

  ‘I fancied I saw the footprints of two gigantic hounds,’ muttered Watson.

  ‘You’ve been drinking,’ commented Holmes, and marched into thin air.

  The Russian Agent

  T

  he fog did not lift all day and so it was that Inspector Lestrade stumbled and groped his way through the bricks and planks of the builders’ yard in Alderney Street, the premises of George Lusk, whose card now read ‘Builder, Roofer, Joiner and Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilante Committee Est 1888’.

  ‘It’s in this parcel,’ the truculent Cockney told the Yard man. ‘Wrapped in a mysterious way.’

  Lestrade watched while his constable wrestled with the string.

  ‘It’s a box, sir,’ was the man’s verdict. No doubt about it, Lestrade observed, the calibre of the Force was improving. ‘Oh, gor blimey!’ The constable all but dropped it in his revulsion, but Lestrade was faster and peered inside.

  ‘It’s a kidney,’ said Lusk triumphantly.

  ‘Is it?’ said Lestrade, who had obviously missed that lecture and never examined the contents of Mrs Lovett’s pies at the Yard canteen very carefully. ‘When did it arrive?’

  ‘Two days ago – evenin’ post. This was with it.’ Lusk gave Lestrade a crumpled piece of paper and he read to himself, ‘Sor I send you half the kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer. Signed Catch me when you can Mishter Lusk.’

  This was not the handiwork of Cherak Singh. The letters sloped this way and that, without rhyme or reason, but Lestrade did not need the Yard boffin to tell him the obvious. An illiterate man would not spell ‘knife’ with a k or ‘while’ with an h. Clearly this was another hoax, like hundreds the Yard had received, yet the kidney could not be ignored.

  ‘Have you other letters?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Lor, dozens,’ Lusk spat into his own wood shavings, ‘an’ I’ve ’ad a prowler around ’ere.’

  ‘Anything missing?’ Lestrade asked, though by the look of the yard that would be impossible to tell.

  ‘Nothin’,’ Lusk assured him. ‘I’d know if so much as a nail ’ad gorn.’

  ‘Did you see anybody?’

  ‘The uvver night, yeah. Tall bloke. Natty ’tache. Proper gent.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I shot at ’im wiv me over an’ under, didn’t I?’

  ‘You carry a gun?’

  ‘Who don’t?’ Lusk was truly astonished by the question. ‘Wiv blokes like you chasing yer own bloody tails. How many people ’as Mr Abberline harrested now? ’Underd? ’Underd an’ ten?’

  ‘Do you feel like a walk, Mr Lusk?’ Lestrade ignored the question.

  ‘All right. Where are we goin’?’

  ‘To see a friend of mine at the Pathological Museum of the London Hospital.’

  ‘Museum? Do me a bloody favour! I ’ad enough of that when I was a kid. Gotta get some learnin’, my old man said. Used to drag me kickin’ and screamin’ to the bloody Crystal Palace. Then ’e used to levver me for cuttin’ up rough. I vowed to meself the day I put the old sod in the ground I’d never go near a bloody museum again.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Lestrade, ‘but I’ll need these for evidence.’ He took parcel, box, letter and kidney and bade Lusk good day. ‘Constable,’ he stopped at the gate, ‘get this letter back to Mr Wensley, at Leman Street. See what he makes of it. And, Constable . . .’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘On no account are you to show it to Mr Gregson of Special Branch. What with “Sor” and “Mishter”, he’ll be arresting every Irishman in sight!’

  ‘Very good, sir. Mind how you go.’

  ‘Lestrade!’ The man in the muffler and white coat croaked through the steam and thickening throat.

  ‘Dr Openshaw?’ The Inspector peered through the swirling fumes.
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  ‘Come in,’ he croaked. ‘I’ve got a touch of the vapours.’

  Lestrade had sensed that.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ he said.

  ‘Watch out for the . . .’

  Lestrade leapt backwards as the searing pain burned through his ankle.

  ‘. . . mustard poultice. I must have dropped it somewhere.’

  ‘Oh, it’ll turn up sometime,’ Lestrade said through gritted teeth.

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ Openshaw collapsed under his towel in a paroxysm of coughing.

  ‘This.’ The Inspector placed the open box under the oil-lamp’s glare.

  ‘Good Lord!’ Openshaw peered at it. ‘Not yours, is it? Oh, no, of course not. Where did you get it?’

  ‘I didn’t. A man named Lusk got it. Through the post.’

  ‘Tut, tut.’ Openshaw shook his head. ‘Circulars! I get lots of those.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything about it?’ Lestrade groped for a chair and sat in the impenetrable gloom like a trapper in a mine, fanning himself with his bowler.

  ‘It’s a kidney,’ said the doctor after some consideration.

  ‘Human?’

  ‘Just a moment.’ Openshaw reached across the table and set up an elaborate microscope. He adjusted lenses, twiddled wheels and knobs, estimating the Almroth Quotient and the Angle of Dangle. ‘That’s better,’ he sighed at last. ‘I’ve been meaning to do that all day. Now, what was your question?’

  Lestrade had almost forgotten. ‘The kidney,’ he remembered, ‘is it human?’

  Openshaw sniffed it, squinted at it, held it up to the light. ‘Oh, yes. It’s also been preserved in spirits.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Left kidney, I’d say. Removed quickly. And by someone not very skilled.’

  ‘Not a surgeon, then?’

  ‘I said someone not very skilled, Lestrade,’ Openshaw reminded him. ‘That leaves you with all the medical students in the land, about half the army surgeons and I would estimate seventy-four per cent of the Royal College.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It also had Bright’s Disease.’ The doctor disappeared under his towel again.

  ‘Whose?’ asked Lestrade.

  ‘It drank, Lestrade.’

  ‘The kidney?’

  ‘Mutatis mutandis, yes.’

  ‘Now for the big one, Doctor. Was this kidney, in your opinion, ripped from the body of Catherine Eddowes?’

  ‘God knows.’ Openshaw reached for a phial of cloudy liquid, sniffed it and drank it. ‘Worth digging her up, do you think?’

  Lestrade shook his head. ‘I doubt if she’d be able to tell us much now,’ he said and bid the doctor adieu.

  Inspector Fred Wensley was more than interested in Mr Lusk’s letter and he sent Lestrade’s constable back to him almost by return of post.

  ‘He said to come to Leman Street quick, sir. He’s got a lead,’ the constable reported.

  ‘Dogged as ever, I see,’ mused Lestrade and hailed a hansom. The constable was paying.

  ‘We’ve met before today, haven’t we?’ Lestrade asked as they jolted through the night, past sleeping St Paul’s and into the City.

  ‘Yes, sir. Dew, sir. Constable H342.’

  ‘Ah, the old H Division. Sergeant Pepper still there? It must have been twenty years ago today . . . before I joined.’

  ‘Dead, sir,’ said Dew.

  ‘Old Pepper, dead?’ Lestrade lifted the blind to check their whereabouts.

  ‘It was his ticker, sir, apparently. Died with his boots off, he did.’

  ‘It’ll come to us all one day.’ Lestrade was philosophical at this hour. The cab rattled up the Cornhill and left through Bishopsgate, the growler punctuating the night air with his whip and cries not fit for a decent policeman to hear.

  ‘Got any views on the Whitechapel murders, Dew?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Views, sir?’ The constable was shocked. He had never been asked that before.

  ‘You’ve been working with Mr Wensley, haven’t you? And today with me? Come on, man, out with it.’

  ‘Well . . . Mrs Dew has a theory, sir.’

  Lestrade looked at the earnest young constable, cape and helmet still dripping in the hour before dawn.

  ‘Mrs Dew?’ Lestrade raised an eyebrow. ‘How long have you been married, Constable?’

  ‘Six months, two weeks and four days, sir,’ Dew beamed, then caught Lestrade’s appalled look, ‘give or take.’

  ‘I understand there has to be a lot of that in marriage,’ Lestrade ruminated.

  ‘Never been smitten yourself, sir?’ Dew asked.

  ‘Smitten?’ asked Lestrade. ‘Oh, once or twice. A few lads with cudgels the other day for instance . . . oh, I see. Smitten. No, never.’

  ‘Ah, one day, sir,’ Dew smiled, then realised his place and crawled back under it.

  ‘So you and Mrs Dew spend your hours of connubial bliss discussing the Whitechapel murders, eh?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir.’ Dew shuffled his feet and grinned inanely at something in his lap. ‘It’s just something she happened to mention.’

  ‘Well, don’t keep us all in suspense, Constable. If Inspector Wensley is being over-optimistic, I may have reason to be grateful for Mrs Dew’s crumbs.’

  ‘Oh, no, sir. My lady wife is spotless, sir. Spotless.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure she is,’ sighed Lestrade. ‘What is her theory?’

  ‘Well,’ Dew looked from side to make sure no one was hanging outside the cab, ‘you know how we haven’t caught any man leaving the scenes of the crimes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lestrade was with him so far.

  ‘Why is that, do you think?’

  ‘I thought Mr Abberline had arrested several people . . .’

  ‘Oh, he has, sir. But he’s had to let them all go, hasn’t he?’

  Lestrade looked at him, shrewdly. ‘You’ll go far, Constable,’ he smiled. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, I turned to Mrs Dew and I said, “Well, Mrs Dew, what do you make of it all?” And she said . . . you’ll never guess it, sir . . .’

  Lestrade yawned ostentatiously. ‘No, probably not, perhaps you’ll tell me, will you?’

  ‘“Well, Mr Dew,” she said to me, “Why haven’t they found a blood-stained man? Because they ought to be looking for a blood-stained woman.” And I said to her . . .’

  ‘A woman?’ Lestrade broke in. ‘A sort of Jill the Ripper, you might say?’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘You interest me strangely, Dew.’ Lestrade ignored him. ‘Or rather your wife does.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’ The tone was more assertive, territorial.

  ‘A woman,’ Lestrade repeated.

  The hansom lurched to a halt. ‘Einer leiner,’ snarled the cabbie.

  ‘You probably speak the language better than I do, Dew. Where are we?’

  ‘Spitalfields Market, sir.’

  Lestrade alighted, landing perfectly in the middle of a midden, steaming freshly in the night. Dew paid the growler and the hansom sped away. The policemen clattered through the glistening cobbled streets that flanked the market. Lestrade’s ancestors had settled here centuries ago, when the weavers had come all the way from Huguenot. Such was the extent of his grasp of family trees. A few roughs tumbled, carousing mournfully, from the lighted door of The Britannia, whence a small sallow-faced figure much the cut of Lestrade’s own beckoned the policemen across.

  ‘Shouldn’t this place be shut up, Fred, or am I being over-zealous?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘I won’t tell Mr Gladstone if you don’t,’ said Wensley. ‘Dew, is that you?’

  ‘Evening, sir!’ Dew saluted.

  ‘Sssshhhh!’ Wensley flapped his arms about. ‘How long have you been on the Force, Dew?’ he asked.

  ‘Three years come Christmas, sir.’

  ‘Well, Christmas won’t come, Dew, not for you, not for any of us, if you clump around in that fancy dress using a loud-hailer. On your Raleigh. You’re too c
onspicuous. Mr Lestrade and I can handle this. I’m sure you have reports to write up.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ Dew whispered, saluting again, though he was secretly hurt at the charge of being conspicuous. He didn’t think politics came into it. He slunk into the night.

  ‘Talking of loud-hailers,’ Wensley led Lestrade through a dimly lit passage, the walls peeling and brown, ‘is it true about Abberline and those bloodhounds?’

  ‘As I live and breathe,’ said Lestrade. ‘Savaged his inside leg something cruel.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s the Ripper, do you?’ Wensley chuckled.

  ‘Woodhouse, the dog handler, is moribund,’ Lestrade told him. ‘There’s talk of putting them down.’

  ‘Who? Abberline and Woodhouse?’

  ‘No levity, Fred, please.’

  ‘Sholto.’ Wensley was suddenly serious; he caught Lestrade by the sleeve. ‘Beyond that door is Puma Court.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t. The lead I’ve got is somewhere through there. Rupasobly.’

  Lestrade stumbled in the corner. ‘Rupasobly?’ he repeated.

  ‘Makes your blood run cold, doesn’t it?’ Wensley nodded. ‘Makes the gangs in the Nichol look like choirboys.’

  ‘No wonder you sent Dew home. They say the sight of collar numbers unhinges him.’

  ‘Are you armed?’ Wensley asked.

  Lestrade patted the brass knuckles in his pocket. ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘You?’

  Wensley pulled a coiled chain from his pocket from which two iron balls dangled.

  ‘Who did they belong to?’ asked Lestrade, pointing at the spheroids.

  ‘The last person to ask that question,’ said Wensley blandly. ‘After the operation he had no further use for them. Will you lead?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a policeman’s excuse me, is it?’ Lestrade slid the bolt.

  ‘Sholto?’

  ‘Yes, Fred.’ Lestrade slid it back again.

  ‘That smell . . .’

  ‘Yes, it is me. I trod in something. And frankly, just at the moment, that’s the very least of our troubles.’

  Gingerly, like a man on thin ice, Lestrade crept into the total darkness of Puma Court. A gate swung in the rain to his left, sending shivers up his spine.

  ‘Why Rupasobly?’ he hissed to Wensley.

  ‘Tip-off,’ the Inspector of that name answered; ‘enemy of an enemy, that sort of thing.’