Abberline: The Man Who Hunted Jack the Ripper by Peter Thurgood Read Free Book Online Page B

of the horses hooves, coupled with the heavy patter of the rain, drowned everything out. All Abberline could hear was the constant drone of the men’s voices from within the cab, but not what they were actually saying. He had one option, which was to open the trapdoor in the roof slightly, which he did as carefully and quietly as he could, but instead of hearing their conversation, all he heard was a very strong Irish accent shouting at him, with a few expletives thrown in, to shut that door as they were getting soaked.
    As the men alighted from the cab outside the Horse and Groom pub, Abberline tried to get a good look at their faces, but from his position, high above them, this was very difficult. The only thing he did notice was that one of them had a large bushy moustache and, from what he could see of it, bright ginger hair. He continued to watch as the men went to go into the pub and had a slight collision with another man, who was coming out at the same time. By pure chance, this other man proved to be Abberline’s Irish ‘friend’ Martin, who noticed Abberline straight away and leaned up towards him to shake his hand. ‘I didn’t know you were a cabbie,’ he said.’If I had the money, I would ask you to take me to the Three Nuns pub.’ Abberline saw this as a chance to hopefully find out if Martin knew anything about the two men. He lent down, opened the door of the cab and told Martin to jump in. ‘It’s on the house,’ he said.
    As the cab rattled along the well-worn cobbles towards the Three Nuns, Martin didn’t seem to mind getting a little wet from the rain, as Abberline opened the trap door and started to talk to him. It turned out that Martin didn’t know the two young men personally, but he had seen them in the pub, and from what he had heard, they had only just arrived in London a couple of days earlier, direct from Belfast. He warned Abberline off them, telling him that they were a couple of hotheads who couldn’t hold their drink and liked to fight.
    This snippet of information didn’t sound like much, but to Abberline, coupled with the fact that the two men had come out of a house that he had marked down as a possible safe house, it was enough to make him feel that it might just provide a lead to possible Fenian movement within the city.
    Unbeknown to Abberline at this time, an undercover British spy in Belfast, who used the name Ray O’Mara, had managed to infiltrate a gang of robbers who were blowing bank safes in order to fund the Fenian movement in Ireland. O’Mara’s contacts within the gang led him to meet some of the Fenians’ top brass, from whom he found out that they were planning outrages in Great Britain and were eager to buy arms and explosives with the money coming in from the bank raids.
    O’Mara knew that he needed to get this information back to his superiors in Great Britain, in strictest privacy and without delay. The telephone had not yet been invented at this time, so it left him with two options: the first to send a colleague to deliver the message by hand, which would take approximately twenty-four hours, travelling by horse and carriage, boat, and then horse and carriage once in Great Britain. The second, which would be the quickest method, was to send a telegram, but this involved writing out his message and passing it to a worker at the post office, who would read it and then transmit it, using international Morse code.
    The telegram was obviously the better option, but how safe would it be? O’Mara talked it over quickly with one of his fellow operatives, and between them, they decided that they had no option but to send it by telegram. No secret codes had been agreed between O’Mara and his superiors in Great Britain, so he had to spell out the whole message, just leaving out obvious names and locations, and pass it to the telegraph operator.
    No telegram was ever received by O’Mara’s superiors, and O’Mara himself was never seen again. The body of a