“I don’t,” said Arthur.
“He stares me right in the eye,” said Officer Binns. “And gets this confused look on his face. Like he’s thinking it over, thinking real hard. And finally, it’s as if he gives up trying to puzzle it out. ‘I dunno, Frankie,’ he says to me. ‘Why do you think I did it?’”
Arthur was unsure of how to respond. He remained silent and still.
“My point is, don’t fret yourself over the why’s, Dr. Doyle. Who knows why people get up to mischief? There’s no way to explain what’s in a man’s head.” He tapped on his own head twice, as if to indicate the thickness of the skull. “Best to spend the time worried over the how’s. And the who’s.”
When Officer Binns left, clapping his feet against the floor, Arthur spent a long minute sipping at his tea. It was horrible-watery and cold. He pushed the tray aside and continued sorting through the papers, dividing them into piles.
Stabbed girls. Shot girls. Drowned girls. Strangled girls.
October 24, 1900
There were options, for Arthur. There was a selection of the dead from which he could choose: a tea-shop girl, recently married, stabbed in St. James’s Park; a nurse run over by a carriage near University College; not one but two separate governesses beaten and robbed in Kensington. He felt as if he were selecting from a chocolate box of horrors.
Focusing on the girls who’d been strangled, Arthur found a number of intriguing possibilities. In the days following his trip to the Yard, he made his grim rounds. He went to see their families, their homes, the places where they’d been killed. He asked the same questions every time: “Pardon me, but had your daughter married before her death?” and “I hate to disturb you further, but did you by any chance notice a wedding dress in the vicinity of the body?” and “So sorry, but when you discovered your sister, was she in the nude?”
It reminded him of his house calls, back in his medical days. He would ask the same questions in the privacy of each bedroom. “And how are we feeling today?” or “How has your appetite been?” or “Does your tooth still ache? Oh, Mrs. Harrington, tell the truth: Have you been taking the cocaine drops I gave you?” He preferred those medical inquisitions to the criminal ones he now conducted.
His interviews concluded, Arthur would, one by one, cross each girl’s name off his list. Within a few days, he had exhausted all of his most likely possibilities. He began exploring the less likely options: Bodies found on the street. More anonymous prostitutes. Even an elderly woman who appeared to have suffocated by accident, in her weakened state, against her own bed pillows.
It was when his options had all but run out that he found himself, on the Friday next, back in the East End. Three months earlier a girl’s body had turned up in an alley behind Watney Street, near Whitechapel. The cause of death, as listed in the coroner’s report, was uncertain. The girl’s trachea had been snapped, and yet there was so much bruising around her body that it was impossible to tell whether the neck injury had killed her or whether it was any one of the other dark blue bruises or deep red cuts spread across her pale body that had done her in. She’d been discovered fully clothed. There was no mention, in the documents retained by Scotland Yard, of a wedding dress among the girl’s possessions. They did, however, know her name: Sally Needling. She was a good girl. Her parents had put her up as missing, and when the body had come in, they had taken one look at it and known she was theirs. They lived far away in Hampstead. Twenty-six years old, she was well on her way to being a spinster and still lived at home. They had money. A nice bit of land. Her father was a barrister. The girl was certainly no harlot; moreover, her parents could think of no reason for her to be in Whitechapel at all, as they’d informed the Yard.
Arthur found the alley behind Watney Street. He went about his rounds in the dark and narrow space. A horrible smell seemed to drift outward from deep within. As Arthur walked a few paces into the alley, he realized the cause of the smelclass="underline" A butcher’s shop, on the other side of the alley, had stored half-carved piglets and cattle husks that had gone bad outside the shop’s back door. Presumably, Arthur hoped, before they could transport the rotting meat elsewhere. While dim, the alley looked out onto a busy thoroughfare. Arthur could hear the rattling carriages from Watney Street as he walked to the most remote part of the alley. It was indisputably a public place, far removed from the closed-door chambers of the boardinghouse where Morgan Nemain had met her end.
This most likely would not be it, Arthur realized. A girl being strangled in the alley would make so much of a racket that it would easily be heard in the street. Whatever atrocity had been committed here, he felt confident that it had little to do with the mystery at hand.
It was at this moment in his thoughts that Arthur looked up. A line of clothes hung from a string going across the alley, connecting a window of the building on the alley’s east side with a hook in the wall on its left. All manner of apparel hung from the line: woolly trousers, bright shirtwaists, leg-o’-mutton jackets, soggy white shirts, stockings of every shape and size imaginable. What an odd assortment!
Arthur exited the alley and looked onto the doorstep of the building to the alley’s east side, from the window of which the clothes hung. There was no sign out in front of the four-story brick home. It appeared to be someone’s private residence. And yet so many garments dried outside.
Arthur knocked on the door. He heard nothing from inside. He knocked again. Finally an old woman answered the door. She had a mean face-squat nose, deep-set eyes, and beside her lips the lines of a permanent frown.
“Well then? What is it?” she barked.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” said Arthur. “Is this your home?”
“No, sir, the queen lives here. She’s inside at the moment, tending to the char.”
Arthur was unimpressed by the woman’s sarcasm.
“I’m in need of a place to rest my head for the night,” he replied. “Might you be able to provide me with room and board for a reasonable fee?”
The woman looked up and down the block, as if searching for someone amid the midday traffic.
“What have you heard?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Who told you to come here for a bed?”
“No one. I was passing by, and your lovely home appeared so hospitable.”
The woman examined Arthur, then sniffed her nose in the air. “From time to time, I rent my rooms out to strangers,” she said. “If they look like a responsible sort. You seem halfway decent, I suppose.”
The woman turned and led Arthur inside.
“How many rooms do you have here?” he asked.
“I might have a spare one for you, if you behave yourself, and I suggest that’s the only room you need concern yourself with.” Arthur recognized that the woman’s behavior was quite odd, but he said nothing. He was making progress.
She led him through her kitchen into a long hallway. The house seemed quiet, or at least far quieter than Arthur’s previous boardinghouse experience. Various rooms flanked the hallway, and Arthur could make out two bedchambers and an indoor water closet through the half-open doors as he passed by. At the end of the hall lay what looked to be the master bedroom. Its doors were swung wide open, and Arthur could see the late-morning light pouring in from outside. As they approached the room, the woman turned left, ascending the first few steps of a long, narrow staircase as she spoke.
“Your room will be upstairs. The ones downstairs are full.” As Arthur came to the bottom of the stairs, he glanced to his right, into the bright bedroom. The wide bed was neatly made with white sheets and a blue blanket. An oil lamp rested on the woman’s nightstand. And on the far side of the room, a small closet was open-in fact, it was without doors at all, and a pair of useless hinges hung from the wall. As his head turned back toward the staircase, he could just make out the contents of the closet: the dark clothes of a woman who cleaned a large household, the torn dresses, the drab bustles, and one bright white wedding gown.