The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors by Edward B. Hanna Read Free Book Online Page A

city.
    Familiar streets and landmarks flashed by in a kaleidoscopic blur as the daylight grew stronger, and the relatively few pedestrians at large turned to stare in alarm as the coach hurtled past: Oxford Street into Tottenham Court Road into High Holborn into Newgate, past the towering dome of St. Paul’s into Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall, Aldgate — their progress from the West End of London to the East End was made in what must have been near-record time. It ran the course notonly of the city’s streets but of its social and economic groupings as well, for while the two ends of London were mere miles apart geographically, they were poles apart in every other aspect. Their journey took them past mansions and palaces of the titled and wealthy, the sedate homes of the merely affluent; past shops filled with finery and all manner of delicacies, through lower-middle-class neighborhoods, shabbily genteel, into poor working-class districts, grimy, grim, and colorless.
    The hansom took a particularly violent turn as it rounded into Commercial Street from Aldgate, the horse veering wildly to avoid a lumbering brewer’s dray: Both of them were knocked sharply to the side. The jarvey now was forced to slow his horse; the streets were getting narrower, the traffic heavier. They rode on in tense silence: The jostling ride made conversation difficult in any case, and the scarcity of information made it pointless.
    The sky had brightened considerably in the meantime, but still the day promised to be a drizzly-gray one. Visibility was such that it was just possible to make out distinctive features of the buildings they hurried past. Holmes leaned forward expectantly in his seat, peering onward.
    “Ah, we are almost there,” he said at last. “If I’m not mistaken, there’s a bevy of ‘bobbies’ 18 milling about up ahead.”
    Watson, too, spotted the police picket in the distance. Obviously, the street leading to the scene of the crime had been cordoned off, and despite the early hour, small crowds of onlookers stood off to one side, straining to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that had caused the police to converge on the neighborhood in the first place.
    The hansom jolted to a halt at the corner of Commercial Street and Hanbury: A rope barricade across the intersection would permit them to travel no farther. Holmes pushed open the doors and bounded from the cab.
    “Pay the man, Watson! I promised him a sovereign if he didn’t spare his nag!”
    The group of helmeted constables at the barrier had turned upon the coach’s arrival, and a large sergeant with a cavalry mustache and proud bearing sauntered over, barring Holmes’s path.
    “And where might you be going, sir?”
    “My name is Holmes. Show me to Inspector Abberline at once, if you please. I’m expected.”
    The policeman’s attitude changed at once. “Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Yes, indeed, sir! This way, sir. Mind your topper goin’ under the rope. Bagley! Escort these gents to Inspector Abberline, then report back ‘ere. Smartly now, none of yer dawdlin’! An’ do up your butt’n, for God’s sake!”
    In appearance, Hanbury Street was not very much different from Buck’s Row, the site of the earlier murder: It was forever in shadow. Narrow and dark, the sun’s rays rarely ever reached its recesses, and the brooding tenements that lined both sides of the street seemed shriveled with cold. They were dilapidated affairs, three-storied brick structures for the most part, with shops on the ground floor and flats above. A few contained boardinghouses on the upper floors: doss-houses, as they were called, reeking dormitories with rows of beds at four pence a night. Holmes and Watson picked their way through rotting garbage to where a small circle of police officials in civilian clothes was gathered in front of an open doorway at number 29. The doorway was located alongside an empty storefront which, as indicated by a weathered sign over the darkened window,