The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (11 page)

Warren nodded. “You do that! And let me tell you, sir, that I concur wholeheartedly with my officer! He acted quite correctly, quite correctly indeed. This is no business for amateurs, and certainly no business of yours, and I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of it. And one thing more, sir. Should you ever meddle in police business again, I shall have you taken in charge. Taken in charge, sir! Count on it!”

With that he turned away a final time and marched briskly down the corridor, calling over his shoulder, “Good show, Aberdeen! Jolly good show!”

Holmes smiled grimly, only the touch of color in his cheeks and the tightening of his jaw revealing his true feelings; Watson stood there sputtering with rage while Abberline, a very pale and visibly shaken Abberline, cast his eyes heavenward and breathed an audible sigh of relief.

“Come, Watson,” said Holmes, “I think a visit to Clarences would do us both a world of good, and then perhaps a soothing steam at Faulkners, if that meets with your approval. What say you, eh?”
²⁸

Waving Abberline’s effusive thanks and apologies aside, Holmes took a protesting Watson by the arm and proceeded out the door.

Thus their ignominious departure from Scotland Yard.

S
UNDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
9-T
UESDAY
, S
EPTEMBER
18, 1888

“I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

—
The Sign of the Four

T
he day that followed Sherlock Holmes’s visit to Scotland Yard was to be a difficult one for him and an anxious one for Watson. Despite Holmes’s outward display of indifference, he was naturally upset by Sir Charles Warren’s contemptuous treatment, and Watson knew him well enough to see the signs: He was totally uncommunicative at breakfast and unusually subdued, and he barely touched the food on his plate. It was abundantly obvious he was in one of his melancholy moods, listless, moody, despondent. Certainly, he could hardly be blamed.

After all, hadn’t he rendered invaluable assistance to Scotland Yard on several occasions in the past? And hadn’t he always enjoyed a cordial if sometimes prickly relationship with the police officials with whom he had come into contact? Never had he been treated so shabbily and so rudely by any of them. Never had he been ordered off the premises of
the Yard like a poacher, a common trespasser on someone’s land. Or ordered off a case under investigation, for that matter. And rarely had his ego — his so tender ego — been so badly bruised.

The day being Sunday, and a damp, dismally gray one at that, the two of them stayed indoors in front of the fire, content to while away the hours in the homey clutter of their sitting room with the newspapers and their respective books and journals to keep them occupied. More than once Watson cast an anxious glance in Holmes’s direction, half expecting at any time to see his arm reach out for the little bottle on the corner of the mantelpiece, for the syringe in its neat morocco case. For in those years Sherlock Holmes’s customary solution to inactivity and depression was almost always his “seven percent solution.”

But he refrained, much to Watson’s relief. Indeed, his mood was such, his manner so lethargic, it was almost as if he hadn’t had the energy for even that. To his credit, he did his best to hide his true feelings behind a mask of imperturbability, even from Watson — particularly from Watson — for he knew his friend was upset for his sake. But of course it didn’t work. Watson saw through him in a minute. Unlike Holmes, he gave vent to his emotions and was visibly outraged by Warren’s behavior.

“The man’s an ass, Holmes!” he argued in an effort to cheer up his friend. “You must consider the source!”

Holmes merely nodded and did his best to smile, but it was a thin, rueful smile tinged, understandably, with more than a touch of bitterness. And it was obviously rendered more for Watson’s benefit than out of conviction.

“Man despises what he does not comprehend,” Watson quoted, but even Goethe’s wisdom encountered an unreceptive mind. Holmes’s response was an apathetic shrug and another feeble nod.
²⁹

The subject was dropped, Watson not wishing to belabor the point
and Holmes not wishing to discuss it at all.

Watson knew that even more than the insult to Holmes’s pride, more than the damage to his self-esteem, it was the sudden lack of activity that put him into his present state of depression. He could withstand almost any deprivation, almost any insult — he could go for days without food and even sleep; but he could not go without mental stimulation. He lived for the sudden trample of footsteps on the stairs, the unexpected knock at the door. He lived for the chase; his sole passion was the game, always the game.

And now? Now, for the moment at least, there was nothing. Now there was an emptiness. There was no mystery to solve, no puzzle to unravel. His life was devoid of challenge and was therefore barren. And he, therefore, was miserable.

“My mind rebels at stagnation,” he once said. “Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere.”
³⁰

So naturally, given Holmes’s mood, Watson was more than a little surprised (and greatly relieved) when at day’s end the bottle still remained on the shelf and the syringe in its case, and not for the first time did he marvel over the one facet of Holmes’s personality that was totally predictable: his unpredictability.

They both retired early that night, after a light supper: It was a day that was best done with quickly.

Fortunately, the days and weeks that followed were to be better ones for the lodgers of 221B Baker Street. Holmes’s plea for activity, for work, happily was to receive a quick response. He was to become involved in two of the most important cases of his career (along with one or two less so), was to encounter the notorious Jonathan Small, and do battle with the “hound of hell” at Baskerville Hall; and, with a mixture of
amusement, pity, and sadness, was to see Watson fall hopelessly, deeply in love — with a woman whom even Holmes, with all of his expressed disinterest in the fair sex, admitted was “one of the most charming young ladies I have ever met.”
³¹

During all of this time, Scotland Yard’s investigation of the two Whitechapel murders was to run its course — and a short, bumpy course it proved to be.

The newspapers were full of it. They made much of the fact that not only was there no motive but there was no real suspect, and frantic efforts on the part of the police were leading nowhere. For a while the attentions of the police inquiry, as Abberline had revealed, focused on a thirty-three-year-old Polish Jew by the name of John Pizer, the man known in the district as Leather Apron. Early on the morning of Monday the 10th, Pizer was traced to a house in Mulberry Street, where he was duly arrested by Sergeant Thicke and taken in for questioning.

The evidence against him was entirely circumstantial and tenuous at best: The presence of the leather apron in the courtyard behind 29 Hanbury Street; the fact that he had a “reputation” for ill-treating prostitutes; the fact that he was seen wearing a deerstalker hat similar to the one worn by Annie Chapman’s killer; and the added fact that Chapman’s lodging-house keeper told a Press Association reporter that he had ejected Pizer from the lodging house a few months earlier for attacking, or threatening to attack (he was somewhat vague on the point), one of the female lodgers.

The police were convinced they had their man.

A broadsheet hawked in the streets gave these details:

At nine o’clock this morning Detective Sergeant William Thicke, H-Division, who has had charge of this case, succeeded in capturing the man known as Leather Apron.

There is no doubt that he is the murderer, for a large number of long-bladed knives was found in his possession.

Thicke was the man of the hour. Adding to the neatness of his case was the “evidence” found in Pizer’s room in Mulberry Street, described variously by the press as “long-bladed” knives and “long-handled” knives. The “large number” turned out to be five. They proved to be boot-finisher’s knives, and the reason they were in Pizer’s possession was soon established: Pizer by trade was a boot finisher.

He was taken to the Leman Street police station, accompanied voluntarily by the friends with whom he had been lodging. He and they protested his innocence, insisting he had not been out of the house since the previous Thursday.

Pizer’s arrest had immediate repercussions for the sizable population of Jewish immigrants living in Whitechapel. Within hours, scores of unfortunate Jews were harassed and beaten in the streets in a wave of almost spontaneous anti-Semitism. Commented
The Daily News
: “There may soon be murders from panic to add to murders from lust for blood...”

That same afternoon another arrest was made, that of one William Piggott, who bore a resemblance to Pizer. He was spotted drinking in a pub in Gravesend, wearing bloodstained clothing and boots and was found to be carrying a bundle of shirts that were also stained with blood. When questioned, Piggott proved to be a willing witness, albeit sometimes incoherent, and sometimes all too willing: He willingly admitted he had been in Whitechapel the Saturday morning in question. He willingly admitted he had walked down Brick Lane and had gotten into an altercation with a prostitute. He willingly admitted he had struck her. As for the bloodstained clothing, he had no rational explanation, but seemed willing to admit to any explanation at all. The
problem was that none of the police witnesses (or all-too-cooperative individuals who made claim to being witnesses) could identify Piggott, and after a few hours in cells his speech and behavior became so strange and erratic that a physician was summoned. The physician took one look at him and declared him insane.

For several hours suspicion was focused on yet a third man, a market porter by the name of John Richardson, whose mother rented the ground floor of 29 Hanbury Street as well as the yard in the rear and a workshop off the yard. It was soon determined that it was his leather apron that had been found in the yard. He freely admitted it. He customarily wore it when working in the cellar, he said, and it had been in the yard since Thursday. His mother confirmed it: She had washed it on Thursday and left it on the fence to dry, she said.

Richardson was released. Pizer was released. Piggott was sent to the asylum in Bow. The police had nothing and no one, and the press made much of it.

Hundreds more arrests were to be made — anyone and everyone seemed to be suspect. They were to include Irishmen, Germans, Poles, Jews, stockbrokers, seamen, butchers. They were brought in for the flimsiest of reasons, and often for no reason at all. Said
The Times
: “It seems at times as if every person in the streets were suspicious of everyone else he met, and as if it were a race between them who could first inform against his neighbor.” And dozens of people, women as well as men, walked in off the streets inexplicably proclaiming their guilt. But the police were to be frustrated at every turn. Few individuals were held for more than an hour or two. There was not a shred of evidence or a single clue to act upon.

Punch
, critical of the police for acting on spurious information, published a cartoon showing a blindfolded police constable being spun around by a group of leering criminals. “Blind Man’s Buff’ was the caption.

The tenor of the times was such, the fear in the streets so great, that a drunken prankster could empty out a saloon by merely claiming he had the murder knife in his pocket. An Irishman by the name of John Brennan made such a pronouncement and quickly found himself to be in sole possession of the White Hart pub in Camberwell. How many drinks he helped himself to before the police arrived was not recorded.

More than one lynching was narrowly avoided, according to the press reports. A foreigner, who spoke not a word of English, was nearly strung up in the East End for merely looking at a woman.
The Times
reported the near lynching was initiated by “an enormous mob of men and women, shouting and screaming in the most extraordinary manner.”

Rumors abounded, the police indiscriminately seemed to chase down every single one of them, and the press, often with ill-disguised glee, reported the results, which were invariably, inevitably, nil. Criticism of the police, by press and public alike, rose to such a level that no attempt was made to hide the fact that officials at Scotland Yard were stymied and close to despair. Acting out of desperation, in an effort to ease the criticism, the police issued a terse “description” of the killer:

Age 37; height, 5 ft. 7 ins.; rather dark beard and mustache.

Dress —shirt, dark jacket, dark waistcoat and trousers, black

scarf, and black felt hat. Spoke with a foreign accent.

It was obvious to Holmes and Watson that the so-called description was manufactured out of whole cloth. High-ranking officials at the Yard thought it would be prudent to try to convince everyone that they knew what they were doing, and since they couldn’t admit they didn’t even know who they were looking for, they decided to invent someone.