CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Problem of Whitechapel

The following morning, I descended from my bedroom to discover Holmes had already finished his breakfast. He had then, I gathered, occupied himself by amassing all our cushions, piling them beneath the settee, supplying himself with an unholy reserve of cigarettes, and then draping himself on the floor with all the incense-shrouded dignity of a heathen god. My greeting went unanswered, so between the hours of eight and nine I devoured an egg and several rashers of bacon over a slow perusal of the Times and Pall Mall.

“A word with you, Watson, if you can spare the time,” Holmes called out as he discarded the stub of a cigarette in a teacup situated within easy reach.

“Certainly, Holmes.” I quit the breakfast table and, selecting a cigar from the coal scuttle, settled myself in my armchair.

“I shan’t tax your patience for longer than is necessary, but it is the curse of the solo investigator that he has no confederate to bend an ear when a problem grows too unwieldy for private conjecture. You have surely realized that our case proceeds upon three lines. The primary—and may I say least fruitful—investigation is that surrounding the Ripper’s actual crimes, which have afforded us shockingly little physical evidence. Although our conference with Dr. Agar last night aids us in a general sense, our quarry still has allowed us no details which could possibly lead to a residence, name, or arrest. The next line of inquiry concerns the proposition that Jack the Ripper, whoever he may be, takes a deal of pleasure in tormenting us. This idea is based on the letter I had in February of last year. It seems he takes nearly as much pleasure in penning taunting notes as he does in committing horrific murders; however, this thirst for correspondence may well prove very dangerous for him, for the slightest physical clue could point to a place of origin and thus prove his ultimate undoing. Am I clear thus far?”

“Perfectly.”

“Finally there is the matter of the Martha Tabram murder.”

“You still believe it to have been the work of the Ripper.”

“I do indeed, but there is another puzzle tied to Tabram’s stabbing, and that is this abstruse tale of Stephen Dunlevy and Johnny Blackstone. Miss Monk had barely been in our employ a week when a strange man approached her claiming to know all about Tabram’s death. Granted, Whitechapel is not a large district, although it is densely populated, and thus it is perfectly possible that she should have instantly met a man connected to the Ripper. But is it probable?”

“How do you mean?”

“Is it not odd that within a few days of our forging an association, Miss Monk should discover a colossal lead quite by accident? The circumstance grows even more inexplicable when one takes into account the source, Mr. Dunlevy himself. I must confess to you that our glimpse of him in the pub that terrible night was not the first time I laid eyes on the man, but it has taken me days to place where I’d seen him before. I saw him the very day we met Miss Monk, as we exited Lambeth Workhouse.”

My mouth fell open at this revelation. “You are certain?”

“Entirely. Yet another reason, you see, for Miss Monk to keep a close watch on the fellow.”

Though I had often noted the peculiarly scientific way in which Holmes at times directed people like pieces on a chessboard, custom had not inured me to it. I shrugged coldly, exasperated by his glibness. “Perhaps Dunlevy and Miss Monk are engaged in a conspiracy against you.”

My friend only smiled. “You imagine I had not considered that alternative. Rest assured, Miss Monk is not in his employ, or she was not when I engaged her assistance.”

“Barring any personal bias from the question, how can you be sure?”

“Because of the scuffed new boots which caused such a fracas last night.”

“I do not understand.”

“Her old men’s boots had two small symmetrical holes just in the instep where the foot breaks the arch, an almost unbearable condition at this time of year when the wet and the cold are conjoined against one. And yet she did not, for two weeks after I had been paying her, purchase new boots. No, she presumed I was joking when I took her on as a colleague, and she clearly had no competing source of income from Dunlevy. She imagined if I came to my senses and cut off her payments, she would still be ahead by a pound or two, which is enough to keep out of the workhouse.”

At that moment we detected a slow, lumbering tread upon the staircase. The door swung open to admit the enormous personage of Mycroft Holmes, the elder brother of the great detective, whose high position in government office was as unknown to the public as it was vital to the realm. While his formidable acumen could hardly be exaggerated, neither could his martial adherence to habit, which made sightings of him outside the vicinity of Whitehall, his own lodgings in Pall Mall, or the Diogenes Club exceptional indeed. I at once offered him a chair, but he stood peering down at his brother upon the floor from his own formidable height with profound concern and displeasure mixed in his cutting grey eyes.

“I was most unpleasantly alarmed about you Sunday when a circulatory from the highest levels was posted directly to my home,” Mycroft Holmes announced. “I trust he will come to no lasting harm?” The latter query was addressed to me, and I shook my head. “Well then, Sherlock, what the devil have you been playing at? You have been pursuing the Whitechapel killer in an egregiously foolhardy manner.”

“Do sit down, brother Mycroft, you’ll exhaust yourself. You are already exhausting me,” my friend replied, both amused and annoyed by his sibling. “As it happens, we came upon the murder scene entirely by accident.”

Mycroft Holmes accepted the chair grudgingly, his eyes focused as always upon some vacant middle ground, a gaze which in both men looked like distraction and was in fact the most powerful concentration of thought. “I had wondered. Clever of you to pursue him unarmed, in the dark. I suppose you continued the chase even after the first time you collapsed.”

I must have looked confused at this remark, for Holmes, with a satirical flourish, pushed up his cuff and further exposed the opposite wrist, which, I had not even noticed, had been more than once bruised and scraped in a fall. “I thought to limit his future activities, but as you can see, rather the opposite has occurred,” he said to his brother.

“My dear boy, you must take this matter more seriously, really you must.”

Holmes’s mouth twitched impatiently. “Mycroft, if you imply that I consider the gruesome murders of five helpless women a frivolous concern—”

“You deliberately misunderstand me.” Mycroft’s expression was as fond as his tone was dry. “It is of immense practical interest, not to mention of course immense sentimental interest to your only sibling, that you leave off rushing single-handedly after dangerous madmen. More is at stake here than has been made clear to you. Whitechapel is a very minor fraction of a vast metropolis, but the effect these crimes are having on the entire nation…Sherlock, surely you see the consequences of failure?”

“An ever-increasing number of ritually disemboweled prostitutes.”

“Your morbidity is misplaced,” the elder Holmes sniffed. “Did you see the report on the double murder in the Star?”

“I looked over it. They are calling for the dismissal of Sir Charles Warren.”

“Occasionally those zealots hit near to the mark of public opinion. Whitechapel will smash the Empire, they say—a hyperbolic slander, but one which worries us exceedingly. Though I know it doesn’t interest you in the slightest, my boy, the problem of Whitechapel is being amplified to symbolize the problems of an entire nation. Even as we pray for progress, we are beset by anarchists and agitators.”