The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 17 A List of Atrocities

October 21,1900, cont.

Arthur Conan Doyle laid his head down on the messy pile of stranglings and took a deep breath.

Who knew that a detective’s work was so infernally tedious?

Arthur had spent most of his day awash in paperwork. He had learned nothing else of importance from the friar at the vicar-general’s office, despite the young man’s eagerness to assist. They had searched through the allegations together, working into vespers, but nothing was found which jogged the friar’s memory into fixing a name to the murderous groom. Satisfied that he had exhausted the usefulness of the vicar-general’s, Arthur made the short walk to Scotland Yard in just a few minutes. Inspector Miller was not in-thankfully!-but the men who were knew Arthur by reputation and were delighted to be of service. He had then spent some hours engaged in the examination of the Yard’s criminal files. If the murderer had in fact struck twice, there must be some record of his earlier crime. And yet, despite the ample quantity of dead girls found within London proper over the past year, none had been found in a cheap East End boardinghouse, naked, tattooed, and accompanied by a fresh white wedding dress.

So Arthur concerned himself with the stranglings, hoping to find some sort of pattern amid these dreadful folios. Having killed Morgan Nemain in such a manner, did it stand to reason that the killer would have employed the same technique in his other crime-or, God forbid, his other crimes? Arthur was unsure. Did the criminal mind relish consistency? Arthur wondered whether murderers were like craftsmen, each with his own set of favorite tools. The leatherworker had his awl, the blackguard his blade. Or perhaps villains allowed themselves a beastly serendipity, employing whatever devices lay at hand for their slaughters. Arthur wished for some tool to peer inside the skulls of London’s killers, to see how their perverted brains led them to evil. If only such a device existed.

He heard the clack of boot against tile and the pleasant jingle of a teacup rattling against its saucer. He looked up from the stack of papers before him to see a young police officer bringing him his tea. Squarefaced and professional, the officer presented a welcome sight.

“Your tea, Dr. Doyle?” said the officer as he laid his tray on the desk.

“Thank you,” said Arthur as he pushed the papers into order.

The young man hesitated for a moment, waiting for further instructions. When he received none, he turned on his heel and made his way to the door of the large office Arthur had been loaned for the evening. Night had begun sometime ago, and the black sky, which Arthur could see from the window, made the New Scotland Yard building seem even more massive, and even more quiet.

“Officer!” said Arthur, getting the young man’s attention. “Officer…?”

“Binns, sir. Frank Binns.” He approached Arthur’s desk once again.

“Have you ever met a murderer, my boy?”

Officer Frank Binns gave himself a moment to reflect before speaking.

“A few, I’d wager. Just last week I picked up a fellow who’d gotten into a fight down at his pub. Man worked for the railways, if I recall. Got into fisticuffs with another railman and beat him over the head with his pint o’ bitters. It was a grim sight.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Arthur, unsatisfied by this response. “But have you ever dealt with a true killer? Someone born for evil?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well now, I’m looking for a man that’s killed two-at the very least two-young girls, and in cold blood. He planned it out. He knew what he meant to do in advance. What sort of man would kill a poor woman in such a fashion? It defies reason.”

Officer Binns helped himself to a chair before he responded. “Do you mind a digression, sir?”

“Not at all,” said Arthur, pushing his chair back a few inches from the desk.

“I grew up in Dorset,” Officer Binns began. “I had a pal there, Sean Runny. Runny wasn’t his real name, mind you, it was the name we boys had given him seeing as his nose was always running-winter, spring, summer, or fall. Anyhow, one year we have a rash of sheep killings in the area. Everyone is up in arms. It goes on for six months. No explanation-someone’s sneaking across the fields at night, slitting right into the leg veins of the Border Leicesters we all kept, and standing there while they bleeds to death. Mothers are keeping their kids at home all day for fear the mystery sheep killer is going to switch his tastes to people. It’s a long story, but finally the authorities catch him in the act-and what do you know, it’s Sean Runny that’s been killing the sheep. Sean! I got to see him just once, while he was clapped in the darbies, before they took him away. I ask him why he’d done it. ‘Why’d you kill those sheep, Sean?’ I ask him. And do you know what he says to me?”

“I don’t,” said Arthur.

“He stares me right in the eye,” said Officer Binns. “And gets this confused look on his face. Like he’s thinking it over, thinking real hard. And finally, it’s as if he gives up trying to puzzle it out. ‘I dunno, Frankie,’ he says to me. ‘Why do you think I did it?’”

Arthur was unsure of how to respond. He remained silent and still.

“My point is, don’t fret yourself over the why’s, Dr. Doyle. Who knows why people get up to mischief? There’s no way to explain what’s in a man’s head.” He tapped on his own head twice, as if to indicate the thickness of the skull. “Best to spend the time worried over the how’s. And the who’s.”

When Officer Binns left, clapping his feet against the floor, Arthur spent a long minute sipping at his tea. It was horrible-watery and cold. He pushed the tray aside and continued sorting through the papers, dividing them into piles.

Stabbed girls. Shot girls. Drowned girls. Strangled girls.

October 24, 1900

There were options, for Arthur. There was a selection of the dead from which he could choose: a tea-shop girl, recently married, stabbed in St. James’s Park; a nurse run over by a carriage near University College; not one but two separate governesses beaten and robbed in Kensington. He felt as if he were selecting from a chocolate box of horrors.

Focusing on the girls who’d been strangled, Arthur found a number of intriguing possibilities. In the days following his trip to the Yard, he made his grim rounds. He went to see their families, their homes, the places where they’d been killed. He asked the same questions every time: “Pardon me, but had your daughter married before her death?” and “I hate to disturb you further, but did you by any chance notice a wedding dress in the vicinity of the body?” and “So sorry, but when you discovered your sister, was she in the nude?”

It reminded him of his house calls, back in his medical days. He would ask the same questions in the privacy of each bedroom. “And how are we feeling today?” or “How has your appetite been?” or “Does your tooth still ache? Oh, Mrs. Harrington, tell the truth: Have you been taking the cocaine drops I gave you?” He preferred those medical inquisitions to the criminal ones he now conducted.

His interviews concluded, Arthur would, one by one, cross each girl’s name off his list. Within a few days, he had exhausted all of his most likely possibilities. He began exploring the less likely options: Bodies found on the street. More anonymous prostitutes. Even an elderly woman who appeared to have suffocated by accident, in her weakened state, against her own bed pillows.

It was when his options had all but run out that he found himself, on the Friday next, back in the East End. Three months earlier a girl’s body had turned up in an alley behind Watney Street, near Whitechapel. The cause of death, as listed in the coroner’s report, was uncertain. The girl’s trachea had been snapped, and yet there was so much bruising around her body that it was impossible to tell whether the neck injury had killed her or whether it was any one of the other dark blue bruises or deep red cuts spread across her pale body that had done her in. She’d been discovered fully clothed. There was no mention, in the documents retained by Scotland Yard, of a wedding dress among the girl’s possessions. They did, however, know her name: Sally Needling. She was a good girl. Her parents had put her up as missing, and when the body had come in, they had taken one look at it and known she was theirs. They lived far away in Hampstead. Twenty-six years old, she was well on her way to being a spinster and still lived at home. They had money. A nice bit of land. Her father was a barrister. The girl was certainly no harlot; moreover, her parents could think of no reason for her to be in Whitechapel at all, as they’d informed the Yard.

Arthur found the alley behind Watney Street. He went about his rounds in the dark and narrow space. A horrible smell seemed to drift outward from deep within. As Arthur walked a few paces into the alley, he realized the cause of the smell: A butcher’s shop, on the other side of the alley, had stored half-carved piglets and cattle husks that had gone bad outside the shop’s back door. Presumably, Arthur hoped, before they could transport the rotting meat elsewhere. While dim, the alley looked out onto a busy thoroughfare. Arthur could hear the rattling carriages from Watney Street as he walked to the most remote part of the alley. It was indisputably a public place, far removed from the closed-door chambers of the boardinghouse where Morgan Nemain had met her end.

This most likely would not be it, Arthur realized. A girl being strangled in the alley would make so much of a racket that it would easily be heard in the street. Whatever atrocity had been committed here, he felt confident that it had little to do with the mystery at hand.

It was at this moment in his thoughts that Arthur looked up. A line of clothes hung from a string going across the alley, connecting a window of the building on the alley’s east side with a hook in the wall on its left. All manner of apparel hung from the line: woolly trousers, bright shirtwaists, leg-o’-mutton jackets, soggy white shirts, stockings of every shape and size imaginable. What an odd assortment!

Arthur exited the alley and looked onto the doorstep of the building to the alley’s east side, from the window of which the clothes hung. There was no sign out in front of the four-story brick home. It appeared to be someone’s private residence. And yet so many garments dried outside.

Arthur knocked on the door. He heard nothing from inside. He knocked again. Finally an old woman answered the door. She had a mean face-squat nose, deep-set eyes, and beside her lips the lines of a permanent frown.

“Well then? What is it?” she barked.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” said Arthur. “Is this your home?”

“No, sir, the queen lives here. She’s inside at the moment, tending to the char.”

Arthur was unimpressed by the woman’s sarcasm.

“I’m in need of a place to rest my head for the night,” he replied. “Might you be able to provide me with room and board for a reasonable fee?”

The woman looked up and down the block, as if searching for someone amid the midday traffic.

“What have you heard?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who told you to come here for a bed?”

“No one. I was passing by, and your lovely home appeared so hospitable.”

The woman examined Arthur, then sniffed her nose in the air. “From time to time, I rent my rooms out to strangers,” she said. “If they look like a responsible sort. You seem halfway decent, I suppose.”

The woman turned and led Arthur inside.

“How many rooms do you have here?” he asked.

“I might have a spare one for you, if you behave yourself, and I suggest that’s the only room you need concern yourself with.” Arthur recognized that the woman’s behavior was quite odd, but he said nothing. He was making progress.

She led him through her kitchen into a long hallway. The house seemed quiet, or at least far quieter than Arthur’s previous boardinghouse experience. Various rooms flanked the hallway, and Arthur could make out two bedchambers and an indoor water closet through the half-open doors as he passed by. At the end of the hall lay what looked to be the master bedroom. Its doors were swung wide open, and Arthur could see the late-morning light pouring in from outside. As they approached the room, the woman turned left, ascending the first few steps of a long, narrow staircase as she spoke.

“Your room will be upstairs. The ones downstairs are full.” As Arthur came to the bottom of the stairs, he glanced to his right, into the bright bedroom. The wide bed was neatly made with white sheets and a blue blanket. An oil lamp rested on the woman’s nightstand. And on the far side of the room, a small closet was open-in fact, it was without doors at all, and a pair of useless hinges hung from the wall. As his head turned back toward the staircase, he could just make out the contents of the closet: the dark clothes of a woman who cleaned a large household, the torn dresses, the drab bustles, and one bright white wedding gown.

Arthur stopped at the foot of the steps. He looked back toward the open closet: What in the world was this mean Whitechapel charwoman doing with a dress like that? Arthur planted his feet, refusing to ascend the stairs after the woman.

“Where did you get that?” he asked quietly.

The woman turned. She appeared confused. “Get what, now?”

“You have a sparkling white wedding gown in what I presume is your bedchamber. Forgive my impoliteness, but it is considerably too small for you to wear. Whose is it?”

Suspicion flashed across the woman’s face.

“And what’s it to you?” she asked, with a note of anger in her voice. Arthur decided that in this instance the truth might serve his case better than a fresh lie.

“My name is Arthur Conan Doyle. I am investigating the murder of Morgan Nemain, and as of this moment I am also investigating the murder of one Sally Needling.”

“And what’s that to do with me?”

“Sally Needling stayed here on the night that she died, didn’t she? She was one of your tenants.”

The woman matched Arthur’s deep stare as the seconds ticked by. Neither blinked. The woman’s brow became cross as she emitted a low snarl.

“Get out, you rotting pego!”

“How did her corpse get from your boardinghouse to the alley behind? I don’t believe you killed her-a man did. But you were here when it happened.”

“I don’t care who you are or what business you’re on. The door is thataway. Make use of it.”

Arthur was in need of some means to compel this woman to talk. He thought of her strangeness at the door. She had treated her boardinghouse as if it were clandestine. As if she did not want anyone to know what she did in this house.

“You’ve been keeping lodgers here against the wishes of someone nearby, haven’t you? Someone who frequents this very block, I’d wager. Hmmm, now…” Arthur broke eye contact, rubbing his palms together and humming as he pieced together the most likely possibilities.

This woman did not appear to share his regard for the cause of justice. He would have to be more firm.

“Quite a large place, isn’t this?” he said. “For a woman such as yourself to possess? You’ve no ring on your finger… You don’t own this house, do you? You’re looking after it for someone else and renting out rooms on the side for an extra few shillings a week. But your little business would be shut down if the house’s owner became aware of what you’re doing, would it not? I would hate, of course, to be the one to have to tell him.”

Arthur adjusted his overcoat and puffed out his chest.

“I won’t give it back,” said the woman after a long moment, her face falling as she became resigned to confession.

“I truly couldn’t care whether or not you do,” said Arthur. “But I need to know what transpired here between you and the murdered girl.”

“I didn’t kill her!”

“I know,” said Arthur. “Who did?”

“I hardly got a look at him, he came by so quick. He came in with the girl-Sally, you say? And she was wearing that dress. When was the last time you’ve seen a dress like that? It sparkled in the light, shined like electricity. The man had on a black cloak, black hat, nothing much out of the ordinary. He kept his head ducked down a lot, hiding his eyes. The girl paid for their room. I showed them upstairs, and that was that.” The woman sat down on the staircase, folding her bosom over her knees and holding her legs into her body. It seemed to Arthur as if she were cocooning herself.

“Well, I thought that was that,” she continued. “The next morning I go to their door, to ask if they want their breakfast. I’d some porridge, and even some ham from the butcher’s across the way. There was no answer, so I opened the door. She was… The girl, you see, she was… And the dress, crumpled up in the corner like it was trash… Hell.” In the darkened stairwell, Arthur could not tell whether the woman was crying. He suspected that she was.

“You found Sally’s body,” said Arthur. “She was stark naked. She’d been strangled. The man was gone. The dress was by her side.”

The woman said nothing, but she nodded, first once, then many times, as if she were confirming the truth for herself as well as for Arthur.

“Isn’t it such a beautiful dress?” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

“You didn’t want it to go to waste. To have the police take it away. You thought that maybe you’d sell it, or maybe you’d keep it for yourself. It must be quite valuable, a dress like that. So you hid it away in your closet. But you had to do something with the body, didn’t you?” The woman was definitely crying now. Arthur took the first few slats of the staircase in small steps, ascending foot by foot. He drew a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to the woman. She used it to smear the tears across her cheeks.

“You took the body and deposited it in the alley just beside your home. You must have brought her down these very stairs-she was heavy, wasn’t she? She must have hit every step on the way down. That’s why the body was so bruised when the police found her. You realized that a naked dead girl would attract rather more attention from the police than a clothed one, so what did you do? You took some skirts from your own closet, didn’t you, and wrapped them around her? A fair trade, I suppose, for her lovely white dress.”

The woman continued to cry as she buried her head between her knees. Arthur wanted to sit beside her, to give her an arm. But there was no room on the narrow staircase. He was forced to stand above her, looking down while her tears dripped onto her soiled shoes.

“You may keep the dress,” he said as he walked backward down the stairs. “And the kerchief.”