Lestrade and the Ripper Read online

  In the City, all roads led to Fred Wensley. George Lusk must have been one of the very few who hadn’t heard of him. And so it was that Abberline and Lestrade, who had separated the best of enemies, met again moments later in Berners Street where the wind whipped Lestrade’s Donegal and ruffled Abberline’s astrakhan. In the middle of a knot of policemen stood their quarry, the Dorsetman Fred Wensley, who had made the City his home.

  ‘What have we got, Fred?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Lestrade,’ Abberline interrupted, ‘may I remind you that I am in charge of this case. What have we got, Wensley?’

  ‘We can’t go on meeting like this, Sholto.’ Wensley ignored his superior. ‘Have a cashew nut. Oh, better not. Evidence.’

  ‘Wensley!’ Abberline snapped. It had not been his morning so far. Mrs Abberline was currently at home with an army of relations. He couldn’t even get at the downstairs maid.

  ‘Sorry, Mr Abberline,’ Wensley smiled engagingly. ‘I hope you haven’t had a big breakfast.’

  He clicked his fingers and a constable pulled back the tarpaulin sheet, Metropolitan Police, For the Use Of, to reveal a middle-aged woman, lying on her left side, caked in mud, her left arm behind her back, her mouth slightly open and the knot of her check scarf carried by a knife’s edge into the gash across her throat that had cut her windpipe.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ shrugged Abberline.

  ‘Good,’ said Wensley. ‘I’ll take you to Mitre Square in a minute to see another one.’

  ‘Another?’ Abberline and Lestrade chorused.

  Wensley nodded. ‘That makes two in one night. And four in all.’

  ‘Does Lusk know about this?’ Abberline asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Chairman of the Vigilante Committee,’ Lestrade told him. ‘Apparently they don’t have much faith in the officer in charge of the case.’ All eyes turned to Abberline, who blustered.

  ‘Who’s this one?’ He kicked the corpse with his boot.

  The smile vanished from Wensley’s face. These were his people, albeit his adopted people. He cared for them passionately.

  ‘Fred,’ said Lestrade, sensing the moment. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Elizabeth Stride,’ Wensley said, through clenched teeth, ‘known as Long Liz. She was Swedish originally. A prostitute.’

  ‘Who found her?’ Abberline asked.

  ‘We’ve got him at Leman Street,’ Wensley told him. ‘A hawker called Louis Diemschutz. He’s clean.’

  ‘As a sewer rat,’ snorted Abberline. ‘I want to work on him myself.’

  ‘What else do we know about Long Liz?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘She lived in various lodgings – Fashion Street, Flower and Dean, Dorset. We’ve got a sighting of her with a man about quarter to midnight last night.’

  ‘Well?’ Abberline snapped, anxious to bend the odd iron bar over the head of Louis Diemschutz.

  ‘Middle-aged, the informant said. Quietly spoken, decently dressed. He was wearing what may have been a sailor’s cap. He kissed Liz and said – and I quote – “You’d say anything but your prayers”.’

  ‘Well, Lestrade. Ideas?’ Abberline barked.

  ‘Could be Doctor Watson,’ mused Lestrade.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Nothing. Ignore me. I haven’t had my breakfast yet. Any other witnesses?’

  ‘Constable Smith here.’

  Wensley stepped back and allowed the solid, plodding constable to emerge from the group of capes and helmets at his back. Smith had been up all night. He was wet and hungry and tired.

  ‘Is your name Smith?’ Abberline asked him.

  ‘It is, sir.’

  ‘A likely story. What do you know about this?’

  Smith hauled out the notebook. ‘I saw the deceased at approximately half-past midnight. She was in conversation with a gentleman . . .’

  ‘Smith,’ snarled Abberline, ‘I have a murderer to catch. I would like to do that before Hell freezes over, if it’s all the same to you!’

  ‘Yes, sir. Very good, sir. He was a toff, sir. Tall. Overcoat. Deerstalker, collar and tie.’

  ‘Could be Sherlock Holmes,’ mused Lestrade.

  ‘Who?’ Abberline rounded on him.

  ‘As I said, sir. I haven’t had breakfast.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Abberline shouted in Smith’s ear.

  ‘Er . . . yes, sir.’

  ‘Pathetic.’

  ‘What about the parcel, Constable,’ Wensley reminded him.

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. Thank you sir. The gentleman had a parcel with him, sir.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I see,’ said Abberline. ‘So we are to conclude that the murderer works for the Post Office, are we? Thank you, Constable. Wensley, you and Lestrade get over to that other murder. I’ve got my man. This Louis Diemschutz. Smith, come with me to Leman Street. I want you to positively identify him as the murderer. With total impartiality, of course.’

  Lestrade and Wensley watched him go – the unspeakable pursuing the uncatchable.

  ‘Cashews,’ said Lestrade.

  ‘Bless you,’ commiserated Wensley.

  ‘The evidence you offered me,’ Lestrade reminded him.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Wensley fumbled in his pocket for his nuts. ‘Found in her left hand.’

  ‘Any significance?’

  Wensley shrugged. ‘Perhaps the murderer gave them to her. Perhaps she bought them. Who knows? We’d better go.’ He waved to the dripping policeman sitting on top of the cab and the hack clattered across the cobbles to them. ‘Mitre Square, Constable. Double up.’

  Constable Watkins smelled of rum. And even now, hours after the finding of Catherine Eddowes, he was pale and shaking.

  ‘Like a pig in Smithfield,’ he mumbled to Lestrade.

  Wensley patted his sodden shoulder.

  ‘What time did you find her, Constable?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘Er . . . it would be about quarter to two, sir. I know because my ol’ man’s watch was playin’ up and I’d taken it to be cleaned . . .’

  ‘All right, Constable,’ Wensley was sharper, ‘we don’t want your life story, lad.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Watkins looked crestfallen. ‘Sorry, sir. I ’aven’t been well. Not since . . .’

  ‘Not since quarter to two, eh, lad?’ Lestrade asked.

  Watkins tried to smile.

  ‘Your old man’s watch?’ Lestrade smiled for him. ‘On the Force, was he?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Watkins brightened.

  ‘So was mine,’ said Lestrade. ‘Now cut along and watch Mr Wensley’s horse, there’s a good lad.’

  They watched him go and heard him mutter, ‘Why, what’s it going to do?’ but chose to ignore it.

  ‘You won’t like this one, Sholto,’ Wensley told him. ‘Never thought I’d see you go soft on a rookie, though.’

  Lestrade caught the smirk and shrugged. ‘I was one myself once. Let’s have a look at this Catherine Eddowes.’

  She lay on her back in the rain-sodden mud in a corner of the Square, her right leg bent up, her skirts and petticoats disarranged. The same tell-tale gash across her throat, wide and dark. The dark, swollen face was slashed, but not at random. Her nose had gone, her right ear. Vertical nicks scarred her eyelids. Like Chapman and Nicholls she had been disembowelled, a series of jagged diagonal cuts from groin to chest. Her entrails lay over her right shoulder. Lestrade caught his breath. For a moment Wensley fancied he saw the man turn pale, but it must have been a trick of the light.

  ‘I hope she was dead when he did that to her,’ the Dorsetman said.

  ‘If she was dead,’ hissed Lestrade, ‘there’d have been no need to bother. What’s this?’

  ‘Constable Long, sir.’ An older man saluted at Lestrade’s elbow. ‘I found this, sir. It’s covered in blood.’

  Lestrade and Wensley looked at it – a tattered piece of cloth, once white, now brick- red.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘A stairway,
sir, Wentworth Buildings, Goulston Street.’

  ‘Fred?’

  ‘Around the corner, in the direction of Spitalfields.’

  ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir,’ Long said.

  ‘Out with it, Constable,’ Lestrade turned to him.

  ‘It wasn’t there earlier, sir. Not at twenty-parst two when I done me rounds. And there’s somefink else . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s a message, sir, on the wall . . . ’

  ‘Show us,’ said Lestrade, and they followed Long past the quivering form of Constable Watkins. But they were not fast enough. At the corner of Goulston Street, the shape that Fred Wensley for one dreaded to see loomed into view. The top hat, the astrakhan collar, the narrow eyes and pencil moustache said it all. Lestrade instinctively felt Wensley stiffen.

  ‘God, no,’ he heard the Dorsetman mutter.

  ‘You’re late, gentlemen,’ the figure said. ‘I have been here for ten minutes. Wensley, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He all but saluted, unforgivable faux pas though it was for a plainclothesman.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Inspector Lestrade, sir,’ Wensley introduced him.

  Do you know who I am?’ the taller man asked.

  Lestrade stroked his chin thoughtfully. ‘Charlie Peace?’ he volunteered.

  The top-hatted gentleman exploded. ‘I am Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and I could have you for breakfast.’

  ‘I’m a little peckish too, sir,’ Lestrade told him. Seniority, especially ignorant, unpromoted seniority, was calculated to climb right up every orifice Lestrade possessed.

  ‘Lestrade.’ Warren closed on his man, dazzling him with the diamonds in his tiepin. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of you.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ bowed Lestrade.

  ‘You needn’t be,’ Warren snapped. ‘I don’t like prima donnas, Lestrade.’

  The Inspector was about to protest that he didn’t care for Italians either when the Commissioner swept back into the shadows from whence he had emerged. ‘Come with me, both of you.’

  They followed him through the early Sunday morning, the rain drifting still across the City. ‘There,’ he pointed with his Major-General’s finger at the crude chalk letters under the portico of the tenement block.

  ‘Wensley, this is your patch. What do you make of that?’

  The Dorsetman read it aloud. ‘The Juwes are the men who will not be blamed for nothing.’

  ‘Well?’ Warren snapped.

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Don’t know? Don’t know, Wensley? You do realise I have an audience with Her Majesty this afternoon? She will want answers, Wensley, answers. The press have already had a field day.’ The Major-General knew all about Field Days.

  ‘Lestrade?’ Warren rounded on him.

  ‘Constable,’ Lestrade turned to Long, ‘copy that down. Carefully, mind. Exactly as it is there. We’ll get a photographer.’

  ‘Constable!’ roared Warren. ‘Rub that out!’

  ‘What?’ Lestrade and Wensley chorused.

  ‘Now, Constable. Or so help me I’ll have you off the Force, no pension.’

  Long sprang forward as though from a catapult and applied the hem of his cape. Lestrade grabbed his arm.

  ‘Unhand him, Lestrade. That is an order. You are interfering with a policeman in pursuance of his duty.’

  ‘So are you, sir.’ Lestrade bounced back. ‘That is vital evidence.’

  ‘Have you heard of Bloody Sunday, Lestrade?’ Warren stood nose to forehead with Lestrade. Wensley wondered how many years Lestrade would get for striking the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and for a moment he thought he saw Lestrade’s knee poise itself under the Donegal to make contact with the Commissioner’s groin.

  ‘I was there,’ growled Lestrade, ‘right in the centre.’

  ‘Right!’ bawled Warren, as though on the parade ground. ‘Then you’ll know why that has to go. If this gets out, every Jew in the City will be a target. It’ll be a bloodbath, Lestrade, and you’ll be the cause of it.’

  ‘Look at the spelling!’ Lestrade shouted. ‘What if it’s not the Jews?’

  ‘Not the Jews? Not the Jews, you cretin? Of course it’s the Jews. I’m going to talk to Rodney about you, Lestrade. See how you look in a tall blue helmet. Haven’t you got another case to go to?’

  A silence fell on Goulston Street.

  ‘Do I assume you are taking me off the case, sir?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘You do,’ grimaced Warren. ‘Wensley, come with me. I want you to arrange for photographs of the dead woman’s eyes.’

  ‘Sir?’ Wensley thought perhaps he’d misheard.

  ‘Science, Wensley, science,’ Warren explained as though to a child. ‘By taking a photograph of the eyes we will see, stamped on the iris, an image of the last thing she saw while she lived. In a flash, as it were, the Whitechapel murderer.’

  ‘With respect, sir . . .’ Lestrade was the first to break the astonished silence.

  ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word, sir. Good morning. Have you finished, Constable?’

  Long had. The chalked words had gone. And so had Lestrade, north on that wet Sunday, to Rhadegund Hall.

  He read the words carved on the weathered seat: ‘Who Spot the Verb and Stop the Ball Shall Say if England Stand or Fall’. He ran his finger over the elaborate carving and sat down heavily with his back against the wood. Northamptonshire was kinder than London; the evening more mellow than the dawn. An Indian summer – the kind of which Cherak Singh dreamed, no doubt – had settled on the russet woods where the owls hooted in the dark purple.

  ‘Are you a god?’ A voice jarred the stillness of the moment.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ It was not a question Lestrade had been asked before. The regal young man before him pointed to the seat with a thin cane he was twirling in his fingers.

  ‘Only gods are allowed to sit on the Altar. Aren’t you a shade old?’

  ‘And aren’t you a shade young to be questioning your betters?’ Mercer strode across the quad.

  ‘Ah, Bursar. Do you know this fellow?’ the young man asked loftily, as though Lestrade left a smell under his nose.

  ‘I do. Why aren’t you in chapel, Hardman?’

  The young man closed to him confidentially. ‘Confidentially, Bursar, I’ve been chucked out of the choir. Dreadful, isn’t it? I don’t know what my old man the Field Marshal would say.’

  ‘He’d probably have you shot, Hardman. Which is what I shall do if you don’t cut along.’

  ‘But this fellow . . . is he on school business?’

  ’I am,’ said Lestrade, sensing he had been talked through and over long enough.

  ‘Oh,’ said Hardman, with all the arrogance of a Field Marshal’s son. ‘In that case, I shan’t detain you gentlemen any longer. Goodnight to you.’

  They waited until he had disappeared into the dark of the buildings.

  ‘What did he mean, was I a god?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘A school prefect,’ Mercer explained. ‘Hardman is only a House prefect as yet – an inferior being here at Rhadegund. No doubt in the fullness of time he’ll find his place here on the Altar.’

  ‘You don’t care for young Hardman, Mr Mercer?’

  The Bursar frowned at the Inspector, pale in the twilight. ‘No, I don’t. Actually,’ he led Lestrade along the edge of the First Eleven Square, ‘I don’t care for boys at all. Vicious, smelly, unpleasant creatures.’

  ‘Weren’t you one yourself?’ Lestrade smiled.

  Mercer looked at him with cold disdain. ‘No,’ he said. ‘As for Hardman, he’s a particularly nasty piece of work. Has quite a coterie in the Remove and the Lower Sixth.’

  Well, Lestrade presumed he had to keep it somewhere.

  ‘Any joy with poor old Denton’s death?’ Mercer asked.

  ‘Very little, I’m afraid,’ Lestrade confessed. He hadn’t the heart to tell the dear old Burs
ar that he really didn’t give a damn about the mystery at Rhadegund Hall, that he was still bristling from his clash that morning with that buffoon Warren. But what happened next shook him out of that. He collided with an upper-class urchin of uncertain age whose macassared head caught him neatly in the pit of the stomach as he rounded the laundry tower.

  ‘Oh, well tackled, Channing-Lover,’ applauded the Bursar. ‘Unfortunately, Inspector Lestrade doesn’t have the ball.’

  Lestrade disentangled himself from the lad, surreptitiously checking his nether-wear to see whether Mercer was right.

  ‘Sir! Sir!’ gabbled the unlikely prop-forward. ‘I must find a master, sir.’

  ‘I’m sorry I am not quite “of the blood”,’ sighed Mercer, used to such slights over the years. ‘Won’t I do?’

  Channing-Lover thought for a moment while Lestrade continued to pluck ivy from his clothing.

  ‘It’s Singh Major, sir. You’d better come quick. There’s been a ghastly accident.’

  Lestrade was unsure in his winded state with darkness descending whether Singh Major was a chap or a reference to the wailing of the choir which crept with the wind behind it around the corners of the quad. Bu Mercer followed Channing-Lover at a trot and Lestrade thought it best to follow him. They crossed the leaf-strewn quads without number, below the Headmaster’s house, across the Butts and on to where the Welland had been dammed and tamed to form a boating lake for the chaps. At the water’s edge, stagnant and alive with gnats, the running trio found an open boat drifting with the breeze and in it the naked corpse of an Indian boy.

  ‘My God,’ muttered Mercer. ‘Channing-Lover, what have you done?’

  ‘Me, sir?’ In the heat of the moment, the boy’s incipient manhood deserted him and he positively shrieked. ‘I found him, sir! That is, Carstairs and I . . .’

  ‘When?’ Lestrade asked.

  ‘About ten minutes ago, sir,’ Channing-Lover was shaking a little now, what with the night air and the shock.

  ‘Who is Carstairs?’

  ‘House prefect,’ Mercer told him. ’Channing-Lover is his fag.’ He sensed Lestrade’s bewilderment. ‘That means he runs errands for him, cleans his study, and so on.’