ReVISIONS (17 page)

The surly commissioner pulled his derby lower upon his head as he nudged past Bell and flung open the hansom cab's black door. “Well, sir, you could go straight to hell if it were up to me, but it's come down from Her Majesty that you're to be brought in on these events. Seems some folks have a higher opinion of your abilities than I do.”

Laying a light hand on Bell's elbow, Doyle helped him into the cab after the commissioner, then climbed in himself. “Perhaps they merely have a lower opinion of yours,” he said as he settled back for the ride.

Sir Charles glared at him, then rapped on the roof of the cab. “Dutfield's Yard on Berner Street,” he ordered the driver. “And make a damned hurry of it. This is police business!”

The hansom cab lurched into motion. At the sound of a whiplash, the horse sped forward. Sir Charles grabbed for the handle on the inside of the door to avoid being thrown into Bell's lap. Doyle's head bounced back against the cab's construction. All three men exchanged glares, then arranged themselves in their seats. No one spoke. The grim occasion for their meeting didn't lend itself to chitchat.

As they left London proper and entered the East End, Bell leaned closer to his window and lifted the edge of the rain curtain, his attention drawn by voices in the street. A pair of men on the curb dropped their conversation to watch with sullen eyes as the hansom cab passed by. It was well after midnight, but the men weren't alone on the streets.

The East End was a place of outcasts, a vast and dirty slum teeming with the poor and downtrodden, with immigrant masses, and with the sick. Economically and socially, it was a world apart from the rest of London and from the rest of Britain. Here, pigs and sheep and cattle were driven down the open streets to the stinking slaughterhouses. Excrement and rubbish and sewage filled the ditches that lined the dismal streets. Between the slaughterhouses and the filth, the most obnoxious miasma that not even the hardest rain could wash away hung perpetually over the district. The rows and rows of rotten, reeking tenements stood in the most deplorable conditions, often with more than one family occupying the meager rooms. The lodging houses were no better.

Looking out upon it, Dr. Joseph Bell felt sick to his stomach, and not from the stench. Such a place was a breeding ground for disease and all manner of contagion.

A raucous shouting suddenly surrounded them, and the hansom cab lurched to a halt. The horse gave a loud whinny and crashed its hooves down upon the muddy cobbles. The driver let out a string of curses.

Sir Charles whipped out his immense revolver and pushed open the cab's door. Bell and Doyle both reached into their pockets, although neither drew a gun. Clinging to the side of the cab, the commissioner rose to stand upon the running board. “Get back! Get back, I tell you!” He brandished his weapon. “This is police business! Police business, I say! You! Unhand that bridle, or I'll shoot your damned eye right out of your head!”

Doyle raised the rain curtain on his side of the cab. A mob surrounded the conveyance. Desperate faces pressed closer and stared inside. A woman's hand reached inside, and fingers brushed lightly over Doyle's Inverness. “Please, yer lordship!” she said before someone shoved her out of the way. Rougher hands thrust through the window. With restrained calm, Doyle drew out his pistol, then returned it to his pocket, all the while meeting the bitter gaze of the leprous man who peered at him. Grudgingly, the unfortunate stepped away from the cab.

“Well played,” Bell whispered. He held his own pistol out of sight in his lap, but he put it away at once.

A thunderous blast erupted from the commissioner's gun. Shouting, cursing, the mob fell away from the cab and in twos and threes melted back into shadow-filled doorways and alleys. Sir Charles Warren of the Metropolitan Police settled into his seat once more and closed the hansom cab's door. Acrid smoke still wafted from the barrel of his oversized revolver as he leaned back and shoved it into its holster. “Damned beggars! Packs of them! Like diseased wolves! They're everywhere, and not just in the district, either. Through all of London!”

Bell could barely repress his disgust for the commissioner. His mouth tightened into a lipless line as he reached into the breast pocket of his coat and took out his wallet. Without a word or a glance at either of his companions, he drew out a sheaf of pound notes and flung them out the window.

The streets grew darker, and the rain began to drum with an insistent rhythm on the hansom cab's roof. The rain curtains rustled and flapped as the wind picked up, and the cab itself rocked under the gusts.

In Berner Street, the cab slowed to a creaking stop. Sir Charles pushed open the door and the wind blew it closed, banging his head and his knee. With a curse, he kicked it open again and the driver, having dismounted, caught it and held it for them. Bell and Doyle climbed down. The thin rain stabbed at them, and the wind snatched at their coats. Bell pushed his hat lower on his head to keep it from flying off.

Another crowd had gathered close by, but this one was a mixture of ordinary citizens and policemen. The cab had stopped before a factory warehouse. The sign on the street-side of the building read,
A. Dutfield, Van and Cart Builders
. Close beside it stood another warehouse, and the faded white-paint sign above its entrance revealed it to be the business of one
W. Hendley, Sack Manufacturer
. A narrow black alley, utterly devoid of any light, separated the two businesses.

Someone called out, “Commissioner! Sir Charles!” A large man pushed his way through the crowd and hurried toward them. His face was concealed beneath a sodden hat that he wore pulled down over his eyebrows to shield off the rain, and his coat collar was turned up high around his neck. “Over here, Sir Charles. She's down the alley.”

“Of course she's down the alley,” Warren growled. “They're always down the damned alley! Why can't someone ever get murdered in a nice, clean street with decent lighting just for once?” He made a gruff gesture toward Bell and Doyle, “Inspector Abberline, these gentlemen with me are Dr. Joseph Bell and Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. They're . . .” he hesitated, frowning, and seemed about to choke on the word. “. . . consultants.” He waved a hand toward the alley. “Now lead on, man. Lead on!”

Inspector Frederick Abberline nodded to Bell before he turned to obey the commissioner. Bell had already met Abberline at the scene of the Annie Chapman murder three weeks' previous. Despite Abberline's failure to apprehend the killer, the inspector impressed him as one of the few competent detectives in the city.

A pair of constables carrying lanterns joined them at the entrance to the alley where yet another pair were positioned to keep the onlookers away. Taking one of the lights, Abberline led them into the darkness.

“Six paces,” Bell muttered as the lamplight fell on the body. He squeezed passed Sir Charles and knelt down. “Eighteen feet at most. Who found her?”

“A passing wagoner heard three short screams and stopped,” Abberline answered. “Claims he saw someone in a cloak and hat run away. We've identified her as Elizabeth Stride, but she was known on the streets around here as Long Liz. A prostitute like the others. Forty-five years old. Swedish immigrant. Lived in a lodging house off Devonshire and Commercial Streets.”

“Looks like your wagoner scared the monster—this so-called
Jack the Ripper
—away before he could finish his grisly work,” Doyle said between clenched teeth.

“He finished it well enough,” Bell replied. Yet he knew what his former student meant. Elizabeth Stride was quite dead, but she hadn't suffered the same butchery as the madman's other victims. She lay on her side exactly as she had fallen, with her face to the wall of Dutfield's warehouse. Mud caked the fur trim of her black cloth coat and one side of her face. A cheap penny-corsage made from a single red rose and a sprig of white maidenhair fern adorned her shoulder. A few curls of brown hair spilling out from under her crepe bonnet stirred in the breeze that whispered over the ground.

“Lots of men have it in for these old whores!” Sir Charles Warren scoffed. “Are you sure this one's the same as the others?”

“There's no blood on the front of her clothing,” Bell noted as he turned her gently onto her back. “He knocked her down first.” He pointed to a dark bruise on Elizabeth Stride's chin, then he loosened the neck of her brown velveteen bodice and the white blouse beneath that to expose marks on her collarbone and chest. “Then he held her down to cut her throat with a left-handed stroke. Same as the others.”

Abberline leaned closer with the lantern so the commissioner could see the violent gash for himself. “We found this clutched in her left hand,” he said to Bell, proffering a small bottle.

In the lamplight, Bell studied the fine printing on the bottle's label.
Doctor Gull's Life-Saving Pills
! it proclaimed.
A Triumph of Science! The Light of the World!
There was more, but he didn't need to strain his eyes to read it. “Patent medicine. Quackery,” he said, returning the bottle to Abberline. “Charlatans are everywhere offering cures for what cannot be cured.”

Sir Charles Warren recoiled. “She has the pox?” he cried, eyes widening. He whipped a handkerchief from his coat pocket and pressed it to his mouth and nose.

Bell rose to stand. Gull's Pills, like a hundred other patent medicines, were marketed to the gullible and the poor as a remedy for the African curse. “You're a blithering fool, Warren,” he said, turning. “If it could be caught by breathing, we'd all be dead long ago.”

With Doyle at his shoulder, he made his way back to the curb. The onlookers parted to let him pass. Without saying a word, he leaned his head on the side of the waiting hansom cab, squeezed his eyes shut, and rubbed his temples.

“Did she have it?” Doyle quietly asked.

Bell nodded. “As I turned her over I noted the lymph glands in her neck and under her arms. They were quite swollen. And on the muddy side of her face, shingles. Then there are the pills.” Recovering himself, he straightened and drew a deep breath. He still couldn't quite get Elizabeth Stride's face out of his mind. He opened the hansom cab's door. “An autopsy will confirm it. Let's get out of this rain.”

Inside the cab, Doyle sat facing his old teacher and his friend. “Then it seems this Jack the Ripper is systematically killing infected prostitutes,” he said.

“So it seems,” Bell agreed. “But why? Is it some twisted idea of public service? Or is it out of revenge because he, himself, is infected? The violence of the deeds suggests a tremendous anger.” He sighed again and put his chin on his fist as he stared out the cab's window.

Then, for a moment he straightened. On the opposite side of the street away from the crowd, something moved in the shadow of a doorway. The wind rustled the hem of a cape, and some stray bit of light touched something silvery. “A knife!” he thought at once, and his hand plunged into the pocket of his overcoat for his gun. But then, the figure stepped out of the shadow and hurried on by.

Not a knife. Only a walking stick.

Some gentleman, a noble perhaps, slumming with the Whitechapel ladies and not wishing to be seen. Catching contagion, carrying it home to wives, to other lovers and mistresses who passed it to their husbands and lovers, from the lowest Whitechapel doxy on up to the throne itself.

He'd just examined Victoria that morning, and her philandering husband, Albert. He hadn't told them yet, nor Doyle, nor anyone.

He closed his eyes again. Twenty years wasn't such a long time, but he was so tired. He rapped on the roof of the cab. “Two-twenty-one Baker Street,” he told the driver.

“What about Sir Charles?” Doyle said.

Bell looked out the window again, but the cloaked figure was gone. “Devil take him,” he answered. “Let him get another cab.”

The hansom cab rocked in the wind as they journeyed home, and the rain beat down upon it with a growing determination. The beggars left them alone, whether because the hour was too late even for them, or because the driver took a different route, Bell couldn't say, nor did he care. He closed his eyes, and thought of what he would try to say in his speech to the College of Physicians, and he wondered if any of it would matter or make a difference.

London, the empire, the world as they knew it was coming down around their ears. In Paris, Capetown, New York, even Hong Kong, the story was the same, and the tale only ended in darkness. He laughed soundlessly at himself, recalling the earlier drafts of his speech in which he'd dared to give a name to a disease that defied him. He glimpsed the answer sometimes, or so he told himself, but he couldn't grasp it. He had suspicions, and he had hypotheses. But no proof and not even a clue as to how to go about finding proof.

The science just didn't exist yet that could show him the way.

He opened his eyes and stared out into the rain and the fog. “It's beaten me,” he said. Doyle looked back at him with tired eyes. When the hansom cab let them out at their address, they went by the consulting rooms which still had not been cleaned from the day's appointments, and climbed the stairs to their apartments. Doyle sank down in one of the overstuffed chairs, then leaned forward and wearily began to pick up the pieces of the broken cognac glass. Nicking his thumb as he gathered the pieces, he said nothing, just wiped the fine line of blood on his trouser.

Bell went to his writing table, and took out a sheet of paper to write. But there at hand was the black case with his needle, and the damnably pretty blue cobalt bottle containing the only paradise he ever expected to know. Pushing back the paper, he opened the case, the bottle, and prepared his injection. Just a seven-percent solution, he reminded himself. But perhaps tonight just a little more.