He continued steadily, his eyes fixed on the journalist. “To my great relief, Miss Monk was in impeccable health, but I put you to a further test by obtaining a sample of your handwriting. I found you had not written any of the letters, which meant that, despite your initial false pretenses, you could not be the Ripper. I knew, therefore, that Bennett was lying when he said he had seen nothing in the alley, for however much like a pile of rags a slain body may appear in the dead of night in Whitechapel, just before Constable Bennett approached you, Mr. Dunlevy, Martha Tabram was still very much alive.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT A Hunting Party

Holmes paused to draw upon his pipe reflectively. It was a mark of his severely analytical nature that the whole harrowing case was laid before us in the abstracted tone of a chemist expounding upon a breakthrough in alkaloids.

“Why would Constable Bennett lie about his experience in the alley?” Holmes asked with perfect composure. “He had emerged from the shadows in which a terribly wounded woman must have been seeking help. I do not pretend to know what happened between them, whether they were once lovers, or what triggered the demon that had lain dormant heretofore. All I can say for certain is that when Bennett happened upon Martha Tabram, she had been stabbed once with a bayonet, and when he left her, only to walk into the arms of Stephen Dunlevy, she had been stabbed thirty-eight times with another weapon entirely—a pocketknife, such as any constable, or indeed any Londoner, might carry about his person.

“What other indications could inform me I was on the right path? The writing in Goulston Street, for one. I expressed surprise at the time that the killer should happen to have chalk in his pockets. Chalk is used by Scotland Yard officers to brighten the white stripes on their sleeves throughout the course of a shift, to avoid the wrath of their superior officers.”

“Of course!” Miss Monk exclaimed. “He carried some in his trousers.”

“Then there was the matter of the uniform. I had imagined the apparel Stride missed seeing upon her killer to be military in nature. What if, instead, she had been used to seeing him in a police uniform and customary high helmet? He would look vastly different in street clothes, and her curious remark would thus make perfect sense.

“I attended the funeral of Elizabeth Stride, for the crimes had been so vile and so public that I reasoned her killer might well wish to gauge the effect of his deeds. I saw no one I did not expect to be there, save for a lone police constable who informed me that you, Lestrade, assigned him to keep the peace at Stride’s ceremony, such as it was.”

Lestrade’s distraught features drew together in puzzlement. “I gave no such order.”

“I know that now. Your department confirmed as much.”

The inspector closed his eyes. “I suppose we must hear the rest of it.”

“I had already wasted many hours pondering how the devil any reporter could know what befell me on the night of the double event, not to mention that I attended the funerals of the deceased, or that an irrelevant, discarded knife was found near Eddowes’s body, or that I had quit Baker Street to conduct researches in the East-end. The Yard knew every one of these facts.”

“And so he held abundant material,” I remarked.

“Precisely—he used Tavistock as a conduit to spread his calumnies. Add the fact that I often jot down short missives to you, Lestrade, as well as to a dozen or more other detective inspectors, and the mystery of my forged handwriting was solved in an instant. He could easily have stolen such a note from any one of many offices. But the final, most conclusive inference still eluded me until a profound remark made by you, Watson, at last sparked the long-dormant flames of deductive reasoning.”

“I can scarcely recall what I said,” I admitted.

“You simply observed, as I should have done in the first place if I were the perfectly honed logical mechanism you present in your tales, that it was astonishing that the Ripper could operate so seamlessly in a district swarming with constables. The perfectly obvious reason for his success was that he knew when they would pass, and on what streets. But when I asked myself what had happened on the night of the extraordinary double murder, yet another seemingly irrelevant fact fell neatly into place,” Holmes expounded, his already rapid speech increasing to match his enthusiasm.

“The Ripper killed Elizabeth Stride without a thought of interruption, for he knew Constable Lamb’s beat would not take him into Dutfield’s Yard. When we disturbed him, he took flight in the direction of the City, and in order to halt my pursuit made an attempt on my life. Then, quite unfathomably, and at enormous risk, he proceeded to slit the throat of yet another girl, presumably because the mutilation, the unholy impetus behind all his thoughts and deeds, had been thwarted by our intervention. He could not be so prescient as to know at all times, on any street, whether or not he would encounter a fellow officer of the law. But members of Lusk’s Vigilance Committee mentioned in passing that Eddowes had been killed, senselessly, across the square from the very residence of a Metropolitan police officer. Bennett lives in those buildings. He knew the routes around his own home, of course. How could he not know them?”

Lestrade shook his head with the heavy calm of a man who knows the worst. “He was in such a rage at you that encountering Eddowes must have seemed like a gift from above.”

“But what are we to do?” cried Miss Monk in great distress. “You’re right, Mr. Holmes. It all fits, every bit of it. But what’s the use of talking about it when at any moment, he could—”

“I desire nothing more than to have the villain at our mercy, Miss Monk,” he assured her gravely. “However, Constable Edward Bennett resigned from his service, citing overwork and fatigue, and disappeared on Monday, the fifth of November.”

“Did he?” I exclaimed bitterly. “The very day Tavistock discovered that his office had been compromised.”

“Well done indeed, Watson. I have reached the same conclusion. Whether Tavistock merely bewailed his misfortune to his friend the police constable, or urged Bennett to identify those who had humiliated him, the results were the same: Bennett was warned off. He could not take the chance that his relation to the London Chronicle had been discovered.”

“But Mr. Holmes,” ventured Miss Monk, “if Bennett hadn’t run off, what would have happened?”

My friend crossed to the window and looked down into the street. “In all likelihood, complete disaster. In my responsibility to lay hands on him immediately, I would have unleashed all the fury of hell upon the good men of Scotland Yard. Imagine it—the killer in their midst all the while, slaughtering five women in two short months without exciting the least suspicion. Worse still, I have not a scrap of hard proof against the man. It’s ten thousand to one we could have convicted him. As much data points to me as it does Bennett, which well illustrates the value of circumstantial evidence. Name the calamity and it would no doubt have befallen us—riots against the force, chaos in the streets. Even now, Sir Charles Warren has already tendered his resignation; Mr. Matthews will accept it at any moment. The case has ruined him. Bennett has ruined him.”

Holmes turned to face Lestrade. “I shall not permit him to ruin the Yard itself.”

Some moments passed in silence. “Well, then,” said the little inspector simply, “what are we to do?”

Unexpectedly, Holmes laughed. “I’d nearly convinced myself that you would not believe a word of it.”

“Now, Mr. Holmes,” chided Lestrade, “I’ve always known you to take an odd line, but you do occasionally stumble upon the truth.”