The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors (47 page)

Holmes ignored the metal plate for the moment, concentrating his attentions on the pavement immediately surrounding it. Lowering himself on his haunches, he examined the paving blocks to one side of the cover with growing excitement. He rose to his full height with his nostrils flaring.

“Here, Watson, give me a hand if you would.” So saying, he stooped down and grasped one of two recessed handles set into the edge of the iron cover. “Pray, lift straight up. Try not to scrape the street surface,” he instructed. Watson grasped the other handle and together they lifted. Despite its weight, it came up fairly easily, and they managed to shunt it over to one side without major difficulty.

Crouching down, Holmes peered into the hole that was now exposed. A vertical brick-lined shaft was revealed, descending deep into darkness, the diameter of the shaft being just wide enough to accommodate a man. That it was intended to do just that was further suggested by a series of rusted iron rungs set one beneath the other into the brick wall of the shaft. They beckoned no invitation to Watson; instinctively, he took a step backward. One did not require an active imagination to conjure up all sorts of images of what horrid things might be lurking down there. He would no sooner descend into that hole than he would into a pit of vipers.

Holmes, on the other hand, seemed delighted with his discovery. “What have we here?” he said, his eyes flashing.

“What
ever
do we have here?”

A constable, curious to see what they were doing, came strolling up.

“Here, my good man!” said Holmes. “I’ll have the loan of that bull’s-eye at your belt, if I may.”

The constable, who knew a voice of authority when he heard one, handed the lantern over without question.

“You’re not going down there, surely!” admonished Watson.

“Oh, no, not I. Not at the moment, at least.” Holmes shone the light down the shaft until they could see to the bottom, which was not as far down as Watson had first thought, not more than twelve feet or so. It seemed to lead directly into a tunnel, which went off in two separate directions, following pretty much the same course as the street in which they were standing. Surprisingly, it was quite dry and clean down there — actually, from all appearances, a good deal cleaner than the street above. Watson had expected it to be a flowing sewer, a place where only rats would venture, rats and, on occasion, the filth-covered “toshers,” who made a precarious, odoriferous living scavenging underground for lost valuables.

Holmes turned the light away from the bottom of the shaft and shone it onto the rungs of the ladder rising from it — on each of the rungs in turn until he was satisfied he had seen everything there was to see. What that could possibly be was a total mystery to Watson, for to his eye there was nothing down there. But obviously not to Holmes’s eye. It flashed with excitement as he straightened.

Thrusting the lantern back into the policeman’s hands, Holmes grasped one of the handles of the iron cover and dragged it back into place, this time refusing Watson’s help. It took some little effort, but he was able to manage it on his own, and he seemed to achieve great satisfaction in doing so, for he smiled with satisfaction once he had wrestled the heavy cover into its former position. “Come, let us see what we can see farther on,” he said, wiping his hands on his handkerchief.

Leaving the constable at the curb standing dumbly confused with
arms akimbo, Holmes led the way back to the corner of Commercial Street and once again turned toward the giant Spitalfields Market with its row upon row of empty butcher stalls, devoid of activity at this late hour. As they approached the market, they became aware of a sickening, putrid smell in the air, the unmistakable cloying odor of rotting meat, which became stronger and stronger the closer they got until it became positively pervasive, predominating over the other smells of the area, the smells of human detritus, decay, and poverty, and even over the ever-present acrid stench of manure from the roadway, an odor so familiar to the nostrils throughout the entire city, even in the best of neighborhoods, as to be virtually unnoticeable except on those rare occasions when it was absent altogether.

Once past the market, they found themselves at the corner of a street which to Watson’s eye looked vaguely, disturbingly familiar. He looked up to read the street marker affixed to the side of the corner building.

“Why, we are in Hanbury Street!” he said, surprised. “Good Lord, Holmes, isn’t that the passage to where one of the earlier murders occurred?” He pointed to a doorway, number 29.

“Indeed it is. That’s where the Chapman woman met her death in the early part of September.”

“I didn’t know how close we were to it. Why, the two murder sites are only a few hundred yards apart!”

“Exactly,” said Holmes. “And I think you will find that we are only a few minutes’ walk from the other three murder sites. Buck’s Row, where the first of the murders occurred, is over to our right. And Mitre Square, where the Eddowes woman met her death, is behind us.”

“I hadn’t realized they were all so close to one another.”

Holmes did not respond. He may not have heard him. He was standing in the gutter, peering down at yet another street grating. Without a word he reached down, grasped one of the recessed handles,
and pulled up on it. “No, don’t help. I want to be absolutely certain that I can manage it on my own.”

He grunted with the effort, but he was able to do it. Lifting the heavy cast iron cover a scant inch or so — just high enough for one edge of it to clear the lip of the recessed iron rim fixed permanently in the pavement — he was then able to drag it to one side, far enough to clear the entrance to the shaft that descended below the level of the street. As before, iron rungs set into the bricks lining the sides of the shaft served as the means of climbing down into it.

“Where do you suppose this goes, Holmes? Does it connect with the other one, perhaps? Is it some sort of underground passage, do you think?”

“That is precisely what it is. And I do not think; I know! They do indeed connect.” Holmes straightened and peered first up the street and then down, his sharp, hawklike features appearing to actually lean with anticipation in the direction toward which he was looking.

“Come! Help me with this thing!” Together they manhandled the iron plate back into its position, and Holmes, hot on the scent, took off down the street, Watson hard pressed to keep up with him.

Within a few minutes they found themselves in Bishopsgate, a wide, heavily traveled thoroughfare that served as a boundary separating Spitalfields from the precincts of the City.

The sky had darkened; visibility was dwindling. There would be a choking fog by nightfall for certain: One of those impenetrable, carboniferous “London particulars,” caused as much by smoke and soot from the railways and factory chimneys and from coal stoves in every kitchen and parlor in the city as by the heavy, saturated masses of air that drifted in as a matter of course from the sea, the two phenomena — one nature’s doing; the other, man’s — mixing together to form a noxious yellow-gray-brown sulfurous porridge that would soon
descend upon the metropolis, as it did with disconcerting frequency, and simply smother it.

The rain had become heavier, but Holmes continued to ignore it. Watson, who was forced to close his umbrella to keep pace with Holmes, could not help but take notice of it; he was getting soaked. The pair of them, he feared, would soon be sopping wet at this rate. “Holmes! For God’s sake, where are we bound?” His leg was beginning to ache and he was already panting with effort.

“Steady on, Watson! Steady on! It’s not far, I promise you.”

“What’s not far?” he gasped.

Holmes pointed triumphantly. “There! There it is! What did I tell you?”

Watson peered through the rain. “Why, it’s an underground railroad station,” he said incredulously.

“Precisely!”

From the extent of Holmes’s excitement, one would have expected it to be the ghostly ramparts of Camelot that was emerging from the mists in front of them. “For God’s sake, Holmes. What the devil is this all about? It’s merely an entrance to the tubes!”

“It is the Bishopsgate station of the Metropolitan Railway, to be exact,” responded Holmes, “and that, dear chap, is how our friend Saucy Jack has managed to depart the area without being detected! It took Shinwell Johnson to put me onto it, for I was too stupid to figure it out on my own. Shinwell Johnson and Canon Barnett of Toynbee Hall, if the full truth be known,” he added plaintively. “That befuddled old gentleman who delights in nonsensical quotations and has difficulty remembering that his spectacles are perched on his forehead.”

It was over mugs of hot tea and a dish of penny Abernethys in the station’s small café that Holmes made his explanations. Abberline,
summoned to join them, sat on the other side of the checkered oilcloth-covered table. Spread out between them was a large detailed diagram, a map of sorts, the seal of the Metropolitan Board of Works prominently displayed in the lower right-hand corner. Abberline had brought it with him, as Holmes’s hurried message had requested.

“It cannot have escaped your attention,” said Holmes to Abberline, “that not only have all of the murders occurred within a few streets of one another, but all of the victims resided within a few streets of one another also. Indeed, there is a suggestion, I understand, that at least two of the women even knew each other. Maybe all of them did, for all we know; but that is conjecture.”

Abberline’s eyes lit up. He saw the possibilities at once. “It is certainly a line of inquiry we can open at once. It should not be difficult to establish fairly quickly. If they all knew one another, or if even only two or three of them did, they will in all probability have had other acquaintances in common — male acquaintances, without doubt.”

“Do conduct your inquiries by all means, Inspector,” Holmes replied. “I am certain your findings shall not be without interest. But for the moment I wish to direct your attention to a circumstance even more singular than the proximity of the, er, ladies’ domiciles.” He tapped the diagram spread out between them.

“Do you see?” said Holmes, tracing his finger along a maze of varied-colored lines. “We are here, where Bishopsgate extends into Shoreditch and is bisected by Bethnal Green Road. This is Commercial Street down here, and just off it is Wheeler Street, here. Observe the intersecting lines? See how they all come together at this point? That is where we are presently sitting — or sitting above, to be more exact. What we are actually looking at is a street map of this area, only it is an underground street map showing the sewers and the various tunnels and passageways that run beneath the pavement. These are tunnels that
service the underground railways and carry gas lines and water pipes and telegraph wires from one place to another. See? This is a gas line here, and these are water pipes. And these are the underground tunnels through which they pass.”

Abberline spoke: “And these marks here, every other inch or so? They denote access from the street above, you say?”

“Exactly. The Board of Works quaintly refers to them as ‘manholes.’ They’re positioned about one hundred yards apart. They are those round saucerlike metal plates we are beginning to see at almost every intersection nowadays: The things that make such a clatter when carriages drive over them, and in which ladies are forever catching the pointed heels of their ridiculous footwear.”

Abberline set his mug down. “And I always thought those openings gave access to the sewers,” he mused.

“No, not the ones shown here. Those are marked differently on the diagram, do you see? The metal plates that cover the holes leading down to the underground railway service tunnels are generally marked with the name of the rail system. See here? These belong to the inner circle line of the Metropolitan Railway, and these over here belong to the East London Line, which runs from Aldgate to connect over here with the Metropolitan and District lines. It is marked quite clearly. It is the new portion of the underground, opened just four years ago.
¹⁰¹

“And these tunnels are all connected, you say?” noted Abberline.

“Connected and interconnected. There is an entire network beneath the streets, a veritable maze of tunnels. The main tunnels are quite wide and surprisingly dry and bright, due to the fact that vertical shafts carrying light and air from the roadways above are situated so close together. Even the branch tunnels are sufficiently large so that a man of normal height can comfortably traverse them without even having to bow his head, and they are astonishingly clean and free of vermin.”

“And this is the way you think the Ripper has managed to evade us?” asked Abberline.

“Without question.”

Abberline looked dubious. “It strikes me as being — well, improbable, Mr. Holmes, if you will forgive me for saying so.”

Holmes eyed him with a cold look. “Would you prefer to believe as others do that he simply vanishes ghostlike into thin air? Or ascends into the sky by the use of some sort of inflatable device, as a scientific chap of my acquaintance has suggested?” He raised his eyes heavenward. “It would seem that the manifestly impossible has a greater appeal to the imagination of most people than the merely improbable.” He took out a pencil and marked a series of small circles on the diagram. “At each of those positions you will find a manhole leading to an underground passageway. Please note the locations of them.”

At Holmes’s bidding, Abberline bent over the diagram and read the locations off: “Hanbury Street... Dorset Street... Berner Street... Goulston Street... Buck’s Row — good Lord! Every one of them is a street where the Ripper has struck!”

“Note the tunnel leading from Buck’s Row. Where does it go?”

Abberline squinted his eyes and studied the diagram closely. “It runs for, oh, a scant two hundred yards or so toward Whitechapel Road. My God! It goes directly to the Whitechapel station of the underground!”

“Now look at the mark I made near Mitre Square. Where does that tunnel lead?”

Abberline leaned over the diagram again, his eyes inches from it. “To another station of the underground, the Aldgate station.”