The Hellgate

Chapter 18

At 10:00 am, the morning of the murder, the police surgeon conducted his post-mortem of the Buck"s Row Queen. Among his findings, to be reported to the Coroner"s Inquest: The victim was missing five teeth (not my doing, blame her slag lifestyle). She had a laceration on her tongue, a bruise on her lower right jaw, and a circular bruise to left side of her face, possibly from thumb and finger pressure (those were mine). She had a four inch incision on the left side of the neck, one inch below the jaw under the left ear. A second throat incision blah, blah, blah… ran eight inches in a circle around the throat, blah, blah… severing all tissues down to the spine, including the large vessels of the neck on both sides. No blood was found on the breast of clothes or body (I"d taken care). There was a small pool of blood on the footway; not more than would fill two wine glasses. (Wouldn"t that disappoint the drunk bitches?)

blah, blah, blahblah, blahDr Llewellyn did get a surprise when he lifted her dirty skirts. Her stomach was cut up. There were three deep, jagged wounds on the left side of the lower abdomen, dissecting the tissues, and four similar cuts on the right. What would the gossipers say to learn he"d missed those at the scene?

Speaking of gossipers…

Saturday evening, 1 September, Mrs Griggs hosted the first meeting of her Dress Reformists after the event the people of the streets had christened the "Buck"s Row Outrage". My good landlady"s followers, Mrs Knight, Mrs Barrett, Mrs Stewart-McCormick, and the rest, came in off the streets chattering like magpies and, it"s fair to say, began a meeting unlike any before. Instead of ranting on the subject of evil stays and raving regarding sinful tightlacing, the latest news and rumors of the second Whitechapel murder were the only items on the agenda.

Don"t think I stooped to eavesdrop on the old girls. I did not. It wasn"t necessary. Their voices, the lot of them, carried up the stairs, through the ventilators and, when their excitement rose, even penetrated the floorboards to my rooms. The thrills were palpable. The air around them was electric with terror.

Mrs Griggs got the evening started by relaying the news that the Queen of Tarts… Yes, of course, I mean the victim. The Buck"s Row victim had been identified. An Edward Walker, the unfortunate father of the dead unfortunate, and a William Nichols, her estranged husband (with their son in tow), had gone to the shed that passed for a morgue at Old Montague Street and identified the cut up corpse as all that remained of Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols. According to my landlady"s newspaper account, when morgue attendant unveiled the body, Nichols told his cold dead wife, “I forgive you as you are for what you have been to me.”

the victimThe Dress Reformists "Awwed" at that. I was touched myself. ha ha.

AwwedThere followed a rattling of news print as one paper after another was consulted, by one Dress Reformist after another, in an effort to suss the story, and find the clues. The community-minded women were most affected by the event.

One of the ladies, Mrs S-M, I believe, reported a good number of citizens and businesses had begun demanding a reward be offered by the government for the capture of the fiend. They debated the pros and cons for some time. The official stance of the Home Office, one insisted, was that they did not pay rewards for information on crime or criminals. It was the duty of the citizen to help law enforcement as they were able.

“How can the people help?” Mrs Knight ventured, “when the killer comes and goes in the night?”

The ladies moved on, other questions awaited. What was the killer"s motive? Was it common robbery? Jealousy? Revenge? They confessed, in league, to being baffled. What had the murderer of those poor creatures had to gain?

The possibility the Whitechapel murders were gang related was discussed. This, according to several articles, appeared to be a favorite among the police. The theory was these gangs promised to protect the women on the streets, for a weekly fee. When the victims refused, or failed to pay, their protectors responded violently. Of course, it wasn"t protection at all. It was simple blackmail, dressed up in a lie.

gangMrs Griggs read a piece from the Star. I remained flabbergasted; the Star in our lodging house! My sturdy conservative landlady was in jeopardy of becoming a radical! The article concerned all three recent murders. (Yes, three; the paper and the Dress Reformists were taking it for granted Emma Smith had been a victim of the Whitechapel killer.) It read:

StarStar"In each case the victim has been a woman of abandoned character, each crime has been committed in the dark hours of the morning, and more important still as pointing to one man, and that man a maniac, being the culprit, each murder has been accompanied by hideous mutilations… All these crimes have been committed within a very small radius. Each of the ill-lighted thoroughfares to which the women were decoyed to be foully butchered are off turnings from Whitechapel Road, and all are within half a mile. The fact that these three tragedies have been committed within such a limited area, and are so strangely alike in details, is forcing on all minds the conviction that they are the work of some cool, cunning man with a mania for murder."

In each case the victim has been a woman of abandoned character, each crime has been committed in the dark hours of the morning, and more important still as pointing to one man, and that man a maniac, being the culprit, each murder has been accompanied by hideous mutilations… All these crimes have been committed within a very small radius. Each of the ill-lighted thoroughfares to which the women were decoyed to be foully butchered are off turnings from Whitechapel Road, and all are within half a mile. The fact that these three tragedies have been committed within such a limited area, and are so strangely alike in details, is forcing on all minds the conviction that they are the work of some cool, cunning man with a mania for murder.The women loved the recital. One might have heard a pin drop as it was being read; and couldn"t hear oneself think for the shrieks when the reading was finished.

For my part, I had all I could do not to blow a raspberry from the top of the second floor steps. "To which the women were decoyed…" ha ha. I had decoyed nobody, and had to fight an urge to descend and tell the lot of them so! I had no association with the Smith tart on Osborn Street. Tabram had interrupted my attempt at meditation in George Yard. The scofflaw Nichols had led me to Buck"s Row herself. So much for my decoying them. So much for competent reporting or informed opinion.

"To which the women were decoyed…"Another of the gathered Dress Reformists (Mrs Robertson?) confessed to being shocked that the Coroner"s Inquest into the death of Polly Nichols had already been convened that day. Mrs Griggs, on the other hand, reported her lack of surprise. She opined that clearly the authorities had no intention of letting the grass grow beneath their feet in regards to the murders. “Scotland Yard,” my landlady intoned, “has assigned Inspector Frederick Abberline to head the search for the Whitechapel killer.”

There followed a succession of oohhs and aahhs of delighted approval from the gathered ladies.

oohhsaahhs“Who better?” one of them demanded. “Who better?”

Of course, overhearing that… Well, it was too much to resist. Despite the fact I was not in the least hungry, I devised a trip downstairs (in the direction of the kitchen) to better hear the goings on in Mrs Griggs" sitting room. The ladies were gushing over the news of the police inspector.

Abberline, I would learn, had served twenty-five years with the Metropolitan Police; fourteen in the Whitechapel slums, nine as H Division"s "Local Inspector". There was no denying his expertise in the crimes and criminals of the East End. As a "faithful, conscientious, upright officer" he"d been promoted to Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters, last year and given a dinner and a gold watch by the inhabitants of the district and his colleagues upon his departure. Now, owing to his knowledge of the district, he"d been sent back to co-ordinate the work of the divisional plods in the hunt for the killer. The hunt, that was, for me.

I"d seen Abberline"s fresh-complexioned face in the papers many times. Over the years, I"d even seen him in person in London Hospital on occasion. Nothing about him, at the time, had particularly stood out to me. He was an average looking man with hazel eyes, dark-brown hair (with a balding crown), a thick moustache and bushy side-whiskers. In his mid-forties, he was five feet nine and a half inches tall, and stoutly built. By all accounts he was soft-spoken and modest.

Yet, by the way the women in Mrs Griggs" sitting room were cooing and carrying-on, you"d have thought the man to be a star of the West End stage rather than a copper. It gave me an uneasy feeling. I suddenly found myself hoping Abberline"s reputation had grown as a result of hot air as opposed to hard work and that he had much to be modest about. Inspector Abberline indeed.

The heroic Abberline began his new duty by attending the first day of the Nichols Inquest on behalf of CID. Another plod and two Detective Sergeants kept him company. The jury was conducted to view the body at the morgue. After which, they returned to the Working Lad"s Institute, Whitechapel Road, where the Coroner for South-east Middlesex, Wynne Baxter (back from holiday, sated on pickled herring and cloudberries), opened the show.

The witnesses included, Walker, the father; John Neil, the peeler who"d tripped over her in Buck"s Row; and Dr Llewellyn, who read the results of that excellent post-mortem (mentioned earlier). Once they"d established identity, the scene of murder, and doctor"s opinion as to Cause of death, the inquiry was adjourned until Monday, 3 September, to give the coppers time to sniff out evidence – time enough, perhaps, to catch the killer.

Cause of deathThe Dress Reformists" meeting had been the strangest in their history. What none of the good ladies knew when they adjourned that particular gathering, with faces flushed and pulses racing, was that the agenda for their future meetings had been established for months to come.