Whitechapel: The Final Stand of Sherlock Holmes (7 page)

FIVE

The Brooke House Lunatic Asylum was fewer than ten miles away from Blackheath. It was only one month since Druitt confined his mother to the Asylum, and he visited her at every possible chance.

Carmen sought fares along Greenwich, and Druitt flagged down the nearest one while side-stepping steaming piles of horse dumpings. The carman asked Druitt where he would like to go, cocking an eyebrow as Druitt responded vaguely, “Somewhere near Kenninghall Road, in Upper Clapton. It does not matter where you let me off.” The carman snapped his rein and clicked with his mouth, bringing the carriage around to face the opposite direction. “What do you think you’re doing?” Druitt said.

“Takin’ you where you said, sir.”

“Why are you not taking Bow Street through Mile End?”

“We can go that way if you’d like, sir, though it really don’t make sense, if you don’t mind me saying. Most carmen don’t like to go anywheres near Whitechapel, and I expect they been takin’ you the long way round. Costs twice as though, dunnit?”

Druitt gritted his teeth in annoyance. “Why do they avoid Whitechapel?”

“You new to these parts, sir?”

“So what if I am?”

“No offense sir. It’s just a bit of a shady spot, is all. I knows me way around it like the back o’ me own hand though. I can have you in an’ out of there in a jiffy, like. Unless you want to go the other way, that is. You’re the boss, sir,” he said, snapping his reins.

“I care not which way we go.” Druitt opened the shade on the cab’s window as the carman increased the pace of the horse and the carriage began to rock from side to side as it moved along the uneven streets. Druitt dabbed sweat from his brow and pulled his damp shirt away from his body, fanning his skin with the wet fabric. The large, well maintained homes of Blackheath and Greenwich gave way to smaller, more closely packed together ones the farther they travelled. The men and women in expensive coats, hats, and umbrellas strolling Eliot Place vanished, only to be replaced by a simpler, working-class folk with dour, dirty faces.

Druitt heard a crunch and squeal over the side of the carriage. He leaned out the window to look as a rat’s body rolled up toward him on the rear wheel before being ground into the cobblestones below.

“Still all right, sir? Not regretting it, is you?”

“No,” Druitt said, scoffing. “I am familiar with Portsmouth. It is a highly depressed area also.”

“That right?” the carman said, chuckling. “Portsmouth, you say. Far cry from Whitechapel, I reckon.”

Druitt looked ahead, noticing several buildings on the upcoming block had collapsed roofs. The houses beside them were boarded up, and though they were clearly meant to be vacated, people still sat on the front steps talking idly. The wooden planks covering the entranceways had been ripped away and hard eyes peered at Druitt from within their dark confines, watching them pass.

The carriage stopped for traffic at a busy intersection where a woman stood near them on the corner, holding the hand of a small child. The carriage was close enough that Druitt could hear the child singing and her mother murmuring soothing words to her little girl. She caught Druitt looking at her and turned, staring directly at him with a cocked eyebrow.

The carman turned in his seat, smiling with a mouth that was blackened and jotted with bits of broken teeth. “You want I should ask her in for you, sir?”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s a working girl…you were looking at her. Never mind, sir. On our way,” he said, cracking the rein.

Druitt turned in his seat to see the woman fix her attention on the next cab as it pulled up. The driver of that carriage slowed his horse and stopped. He got down and opened the back door for the woman, who immediately entered, then he scooped up the little girl and sat her down on the seat beside him up front. The last thing Druitt saw before turning around was the driver putting one of the reins in the little girl’s hands and telling her to crack it as hard as she could. The man in the back of the cab undid his trousers and grabbed the child’s mother by the back of the head and forced it into his lap.

~ * * * ~

“Has she been like this for long?” Druitt asked. “Why was I not immediately informed of the change in her status?”

Ann Druitt stared blankly back at him. The irises of her eyes had gone milk white. Her mouth hung open, as if someone had unscrewed the hinges of her jaw and strings of drool were spooling from her teeth.

Doctor Steward checked his notes. “It has been three days since she’s spoken. Her last reported complaint was that all of the blood in her body had shifted to the left side. She told me that the entire right portion of her body had been replaced with a colorful variety of other fluids. Since your mother’s arrival last month, she has regularly complained of similar ailments. On the last night anyone heard her speak, the patient stationed in the bed beside hers reported that Ann began screaming in the middle of the night. Of course, around here that can be quite common. When we checked on her that morning, she was like this. Am I to assume that your father’s name is Jack?”

“No, it was not.”

“Curious,” the doctor said.

Druitt banged his fist on the table, “Enough chatter, I want something done. She needs to be conscious of her surroundings. She needs to know exactly where she is.”

The doctor set his notes down, “I am glad that you feel that way, Mr. Druitt. I have been reading about a doctor in Switzerland who has been performing an experimental psychosurgery on his patients. He’s met with some success, but is currently looking for more test subjects. I think your mother fits his criteria, and we would certainly be interested in having someone from Brooke House participate in such a prestigious endeavor. Is that something you might consider?”

“No,” Druitt said.

“The only cost involved is getting your mother to Switzerland,” he said. “Dr. Burckhardt is-“

“No,” Druitt said. “I want her near enough that I can see her regularly.”

Dr. Steward cleared his throat, and picked his notes back up. “There is another matter I wish to discuss with you, Mr. Druitt. It is noted on your mother’s charts that mental aberration runs in your family, and recent research has shown conditions similar to hers can be hereditary. However, given her condition, I want to qualify some of the things she has told us. It is not unusual for our patients to wholly fabricate histories for themselves. Given her condition…”

Druitt ignored him, staring into his mother’s eyes.

Dr. Stewart cleared his throat, “She told us her mother committed suicide when she was five years old. Apparently the body was discovered on Christmas morning. After her mother’s death, an Aunt moved in to help care for the children, but that woman subsequently slit her wrists in a bathtub two years later. Finally, it says that your older sister committed suicide as a child. Your mother said she leapt out of a window and landed on a wrought-iron fence. Is all of this true?”

Druitt turned on the doctor and suddenly smiled, his voice calm and soothing when he spoke, “All of that is a complete fabrication, Dr. Steward. I would request you do not besmirch my family’s good name by recording such nonsense on any official documentation.”

“Of course,” Dr. Steward said, making notations on the chart. “I will give you a moment alone with her, before I return. Have a good day, Mr. Druitt.”

“One moment, Doctor. Why did you ask if my father’s name was Jack?”

“She was calling for someone by that name,” Dr. Stewart said. “She kept saying she’d been expecting him.”

Druitt watched the doctor leave. He looked back at the old woman, who had not moved at all. Only the puddle of drool on the table below had gotten larger. Druitt leaned forward and whispered, “I will not let you slip away so easily.”

~ * * * ~

On August Seventh, Druitt sat in his apartment preparing for the next day’s classes, when he found a copy of the Evening Star slid under his door. He sipped a cup of tea, glancing through the paper, when he saw an article that caught his eye.

“A WHITECHAPEL HORROR.”

A woman, now lying unindentified at the mortuary, Whitechapel, was ferociously stabbed to death this morning, between two and four o’clock, on the landing of a stone staircase in George’s-buildings, Whitechapel.

George’s-buildings are tenements occupied by the poor laboring class. A lodger going early to his work found the body. Another lodger says the murder was not committed when he returned home about two o’clock. The woman was stabbed in 20 places. No weapon was found near her, and the murderer has left no trace. She is of middle age and height, has black hair and a large, round face, and apparently belonged to the lowest class.

Druitt read the article several times, picturing the woman’s body sprawled on the stairwell, blood leaking from the multitude of wounds. What daring, he thought. None of the tenants in the building had heard a thing.

The next day, Druitt read more articles about the killing. The Star had been wrong. She was actually stabbed thirty-nine times. The official tally of Martha Tabram’s destruction was five wounds to the right lung, two to the left lung, five to the liver, two to the spleen, and six more to the stomach. The newspapers could not make sense of the injuries, but he could. Perfectly.

Druitt sifted through the piles of papers again, setting aside the ones that showed artist’s renditions of the murder, or the crime scene.

Had the killer lured Tabram into the stairwell with a promise of reward for a quick sexual favor? It was not his pego that he showed her, Druitt thought. It was something stronger, something sharper, and he shoved it into her again and again. Druitt imagined the woman screaming and begging, and he sighed, sitting back in his chair, touching himself.

Over the following three weeks, Druitt followed each detail released about the murder. There were plenty to be had. The newspapers enthusiastically detailed Scotland Yard’s utter lack of ability to pursue the investigation in a serious manner. The investigators were pinning all their hopes of identifying the killer on a few local drunken wretches who claimed to have clues for them.

He travelled by train back to Whitechapel and paced Commercial Street, finally finding Wentworth, and then the George’s Yard building. “Pleasure for a penny, sir,” women called out to him as he passed.

“Oy, come have a go at me ol’ lady, mate. She ain’t got no diseases,” a man said, grabbing him by the arm.

“I haven’t eaten in days, m’lord,” a woman said, carrying a small dirty child. “Spare a coin? I will earn it.”

Drunkards lie scattered in the alleyways as thieves rifled their pockets, kicking the men if nothing was found. Small cringing children cried from the stoops of the buildings. Immigrant shopkeepers stood by their doors with heavy truncheons in their hands, eyeing the people on the street cautiously. Desperate people doing desperate things, Druitt thought, recalling the words his father’s cab man had spoken so long ago.

He came to Dorset Street, eyeing the mass of people coming in and out of the bars. He smelled stale urine covering the walls of the alleyways, where shadows moved within, mounting one another and stealing off into the night. A sign hanging outside of a tavern called Blue Coat Boy advertising rooms for rent.

Druitt went inside the pub and up the steps. A man sat at the top of the stairs, behind a small, rickety desk. “This ain’t the sort a place for a well-dressed man like yourself, sir. I’d go back downstairs before somebody decides to keep yeh up here.”

“I would like to inquire about a room, sir,” Druitt said.

“Well then, you came to the right man, sir! We have several rooms available. You do have money on yeh?”

Druitt pulled out several coins. “Is this sufficient?”

“Only for you an’ about a dozen other people to stay the week. Gimme two o’ them an’ you can have a room all to yourself, with sheets an’ all.”

Druitt handed the money over, and thanked the gentleman as he was shown which room was his. Druitt looked away from the people who stared at him as he passed. He shut the door to his room, feeling his heart beating so rapidly that he had to sit down. The bed’s metal springs bit into his skin, but he did not move for hours, fascinated by the sounds of people in the rooms around him, fighting, copulating, and screaming.

He sat, recounting the details of the streets he’d walked; how the alleyways snaked in and out of the tenement buildings. His eyes began to grow heavy, and he closed them.

Druitt was inside a carriage sitting next to his father. His father was the same age as when they had first travelled to Portsmouth, but Druitt was a fully grown man. The carriage was taking them to William’s office, which was no longer in Portsmouth. Now they were headed to Commercial Street in the center of Whitechapel. A long line of whores waited outside the door to William’s office.

The carriage stopped and they exited the cab. The whores cringed as he stepped onto the sidewalk and opened the door to the office. He left it open behind him and walked into the operating room. It was crowded with onlookers. Police, journalists, royalty, all had crowded into the room to watch him perform.

William brought the first woman in. The crowd gasped as William stripped away her clothing and she walked timidly toward Druitt. Druitt showed her the knife, turning it so that the light reflected from the overhead lanterns on its bright mirrored surface. “Lie down, whore,” Druitt commanded.

“Thank you all for coming to bear witness to our little demonstration,” William said, wiping his hands on a towel. “My son, Jack, will now begin with the first cut.”

Druitt paused, staring at his father.

“I am so sorry, my boy. Jack is what I meant to name you before your mother insisted on giving you that dreadful name. Jack is who you should have been, rather than what you became. These things happen when your mother is filth.”

~ * * * ~