Текст книги "Dust and Shadow"

Автор книги: Lyndsay Faye

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Bonfire Night

I awoke the next morning to find Sherlock Holmes standing over me in his pea jacket and rough red scarf, tossing a heap of worn clothing in the corner. He was distressingly energized, and I knew from the deep arcs under his eyes that his night had been a sleepless one.

“What is the time?”

“Close upon eight.”

“You have been out?”

“I have been rambling about town and took the liberty of making a few purchases on your behalf.”

“Indeed? Have you eaten?”

“A cup of coffee. Now, Watson, I trust you won’t mind exercising a small precaution I’ve been forced to employ when traveling in these circles. I would appreciate your donning the exceedingly shabby attire to your immediate left, topped with that old coat. Forgive me for having torn it in a few places. Just at the moment, you appear far too affluent to be associated with Jack Escott, but that hearty fellow will meet you downstairs in ten minutes’ time, and we will take our morning wet at the Ten Bells public house, preceded by a good brisk walk.”

In less than the time specified, I met Holmes (or rather, Holmes in the guise of the seafaring type I took to be called Jack Escott) downstairs, and we struck off in the coarse beige light of morning. Twenty minutes had passed before the tavern appeared on the corner of Church Street, its doorway flanked by simple columns and its sign, black with “The Ten Bells” marked out in white lettering, swaying gently in the breeze. The single room inside was littered with chairs and knife-scarred tables, while the walls boasted pictorial tiling degraded nearly to ruins by a tenacious layer of grit.

“You are wondering what our intent may be,” Holmes responded softly, though I had said nothing. “Never fear—just be sure to agree with me at every turn, and we’ll soon come out all right.”

The bar was far busier than I would ever have guessed at that hour, the locals industriously draining their cups before setting off to accomplish the labours or leisures of their respective days. A knot of bedraggled half-pay soldiers soon spied Holmes and waved us lazily over to their table.

“Where’d you pick up this one, then, Escott?” hailed a short fellow of middle years, with regulation side-whiskers and the peering red gaze of a man who is seldom if ever free from the influence of strong drink.

“This is Middleton, an old mate of mine just back in town. Murphy! A round of porter for the table.”

“How are you, Middleton?” asked the soldier as more brews were poured. I was formulating a reply when my friend interjected.

“Oh, never mind him, Kettle. He was in Afghanistan, you know. Saw more of life than any of us should, or so I’ve gathered. Only talks when he’s had a drop too many, and even then it’s of Ghazis, bless him.”

“What was it, then? Kandahar?”

Holmes laughed, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nothing so pleasant as that. Maiwand.* You’d best leave him be.”

The former guardsmen squinted sympathetically. “Well, then, what about you, Escott? Back to the Three Cobras tonight?”

Holmes’s eyes narrowed dreamily. “It had crossed my mind. Middleton here’s a ruddy connoisseur of the stuff. We’ve been rambling about all night. Stumbled onto that fellow Blackstone, what was in Egypt a few years back.”

“Johnny Blackstone? Haven’t run into him for over a week now. Your friend here may keep mum more than is usual, but it’s a sight more peaceful than that Blackstone’s balmy talk.”

“That’ll be the black drop. He means no harm.”

“I daresay you’re right. But he was in a dark mood last I laid eyes on him.”

“I meant to stop by his digs last week—he allowed as he’d be the better for company, but damned if there weren’t a pipe in my hand when I said it. It was as much as I could do to recall it were in Spitalfields, let alone the address.”

“He lives in Sandy’s Row, over Widegate Street area. Keeps himself to himself for the most part, but I dropped in for a nightcap, last month it must have been, though I’ve not been back since. There he is up at the back of the building, windows all stopped up with scraps. Small wonder he’s so few folk looking in.”

“Maybe he likes it that way. At any rate, I’ve Middleton to share a morning pipe if Blackstone’s too deep in the dumps to crawl out of ’em.” My friend shrugged, finishing the last of his beer.

“You don’t mean to stop by now, do you?” Kettle asked. “Lord knows what den he’s holed up in. He’s that cracked—sets off at one or two in the morning on his rambles and never thinks of his rooms till late the next day. If you want to find him there, look in tonight before midnight.”

We said our good-byes and ambled outdoors. I could see the bustling eastern side of Spitalfields Market across the road from us, and the smell of livestock and freshly unearthed onions wafted along the street. My friend was a taut whipcord of suppressed vitality as we set off aimlessly down the road.

“That’s done it,” Holmes said quietly, but with the thrill of the chase in his clipped tenor. “I had the house number yesterday from a fellow called Wicks over three cups of gin.”

“Have you all this while been seeking out Blackstone’s lodgings?”

“Indeed yes. It is no joke to infiltrate a network of people and, through expert maneuvering, convey the impression that you have existed on the periphery for far longer than anyone can recall.”

“I was astonished at their manner toward you. You might have known them for years.”

“For the first five days, I divided no less than eighteen hours a day amongst the most popular dens between Whitechapel and Limehouse, my brain nothing more than a massive sponge. I flatter myself I had the lay of the land fairly quickly, deducing as much as I observed. Patterns began to emerge. When I felt confident enough, and these fellows had grown used to the sight of me, I began dropping names—a brother who’d reenlisted, a friend who’d died, a girl who hadn’t been seen in years. I established undisputed, unprovable connections. At last my own story came out. Where had I been? At sea, these four years. Soon I was so universally trusted that I could elicit information with very little fear of being caught.

“When Mr. Li conveyed the message that Blackstone was at the Three Cobras, I arrived mere minutes too late, but his departure easily occasioned talk of him amongst his associates. Slowly, as if I were piecing together a smashed Abyssinian urn, an image emerged. He has not lived long in the area, and no one knew him before August. He resides alone, more often than not going about in a uniform in spite of his discharge. He is a mass of contradictions: despite his rugged good looks and cynical charm, he shuns the company of women. Though his mood is nearly always black and his temper violent, he is well liked by the other lads for his clever speech and free purse.

“I desired nothing more than to find out his lodgings, but it soon became clear that the slippery devil hardly ever receives guests. It could not have been more taxing, Watson—it was a more delicate combination of deductive reasoning and guarded conversation than I ever anticipated, but the final link you witnessed yourself, and the end of the search lies before us. I confess that I feared when you arrived, your presence would disrupt my little fiction. Thankfully, I had nearly reached my goal, and a trusty comrade will now be of inestimable use.”

“No one else could have accomplished so much, and without arousing the slightest suspicion,” I declared warmly.

Holmes waved away my compliment, but the gesture was a gentle one. “Your envelope is cause for the greatest concern. It was postmarked Saturday, the twentieth of October. Tavistock has had more damning information in his hands for over two weeks now. At any moment, he may publish another stylishly phrased defamation. Then there is the Ripper himself to consider; since he set out to terrorize the unfortunates of Whitechapel, he has never paused this long in his ungodly work. If the pattern of dates continues, he will strike again no later than the eighth of November.”

“May we run the villain down tonight, for their sakes.”

“For all of London, my dear fellow,” he replied grimly. “But above all, for their sakes.”

We passed the day easily in the ramshackle room, Holmes chatting desultorily of violins and their origins in sixteenth-century Italy until the sun had fallen. After a bowl of stew and tumbler of whiskey in a nearby tavern, we set off under the clearest night sky we had seen in some time. My friend steered us immediately north, and I quickly recognized our path as we passed the railway depot and crossed Aldgate High Street. A group of street urchins were setting off a riot of firecrackers in an old cistern, and I recalled as a shower of golden sparks fell upon the roofs of the warehouses that it was Guy Fawkes Day, the fifth of November.

“I cannot express how galling it was to have the house number from a semidelirious sot moments before he lost any pretense at consciousness,” Holmes remarked as the crack and hiss of gunpowder faded into the distance. “However, despite the delay, it was as well we learned of the street from Kettle, for he knows more of Blackstone’s habits than anyone.”

“What do you imagine will happen, Holmes?”

“Suffice it to say we had best prepare for anything. In any event, I don’t suppose either of us will ever again fail to remember the fifth of November.”

We strode down a slick side street littered with whimsical configurations of rubbish gathered into heaps, which I gradually perceived were actually for sale. Broken pipes, cracked cookware, split boots, rusted keys, and twisted cutlery spilled onto the cobbles, and all the smells of the thrice-mended clothing permeated the air. Through this purgatory of lost objects Holmes picked his way easily, until we emerged onto an open byway, edged with warehouses whose smokestacks churned black exhalations into the night. Here numerous bonfires blazed, with crude Guy Fawkes effigies roasting above them, and the locals turned spitted potatoes over the coals as they cheered the roar of distant detonations.

My friend stopped at a corner and pointed without hesitation to a rickety structure which leaned against its neighbour for succour in its extreme old age. Though the street was unmarked at that juncture, I had no doubt but that Holmes’s encyclopedic knowledge had led us directly to Blackstone’s dwelling place.

“You have your weapon about you, I trust?”

“My service revolver is in my pocket.”

“Very good.” He plunged off the pavement, such as it was, and we approached the sagging grey door. The detective’s knock produced nothing more than a hollow thumping which died away the instant it was produced.

“There seems to be no one on the ground floor,” he whispered, cracking the lens of his dark lantern. “Let us see if there is any sign of life on the upper levels.”

We tried the door and found it latched, but with the aid of his pocketknife, Holmes had it open in a few seconds. A mouse squeaked in the corner and then fled through shafts of lunar illumination to its sanctuary under the stair. My friend crept toward the staircase and ascended, I at his heels, each of us straining our ears for any indication that the floor we approached was occupied.

Two doors, each slightly ajar, presented themselves upon the next landing. The further one sat in shadow, the nearer lashed with bars of silver light from the cracked roof high above us. Without a sound, Holmes moved through the closer door and into the room.

Inside stood a perfect representation of a family’s living quarters, with a pot on the stove, a pile of clothing half folded on the floor, even a string of carefully collected, brightly coloured bits of broken glass hung over a tiny basket draped with blankets in the corner. A thin film of dust lay over the entire room. I caught Holmes by the wrist.

“Out. Quickly,” I ordered, and in a few steps we were back in the hallway. Holmes’s searching expression swiftly cleared when he had deduced the cause behind the uncanny scene that I, as a doctor, had once encountered before.

“Cholera or smallpox?”

“It seems to be no longer worth finding out.”

My friend nodded and immediately diverted his attention to the other door, which he opened with a gentle push before poking his head inside.

“This one is uninhabitable, at least in the winter. A fire seems to have eaten away the outer wall some years ago. Our man resides upstairs on the second floor.”

Grasping the butt of my revolver firmly, I advanced up the final set of stairs behind Holmes. Though dustier and fallen into further disrepair, I did not need his finely honed senses to inform me that someone was in the habit of passing this way.

A single unmarked door appeared at the end of the second-floor corridor. My friend strode forward without a backward glance and threw open the final unlatched portal.

I saw at once, despite the poverty of light caused by strips of cloth hanging over the two tiny windows, that no one was there. Holmes opened the full flood of the lantern’s brilliance and handed it to me. Remaining just outside lest I trample some fragment vital to his investigation, I replaced my revolver in my pocket and examined the room from the hallway. Filth encrusted every surface and a sickly sweet smell, like burnt sugar that had been allowed to decay, permeated the very walls of the place.

Holmes set instantly to exploring every inch of the chamber with an expression of the utmost gravity, and I very soon determined why. Apart from a blanket and a broken chair, not a single object remained in the room. And despite the noxious atmosphere, I failed to spy either pipe or bag which might have contained any opium.

“There has been some deviltry at work here,” Holmes said in his coldest, most impassive tone. “Come in—there’s nothing to be learned from the floor.”

“Our bird appears to have flown,” I commented.

“But in heaven’s name, why? I was meticulous. I am prepared to swear that no one has the least idea I am even searching for him.” Holmes gestured dispiritedly with a wide sweep of his lean arm. “A blanket, and a chair. They tell us nothing. And yet…in a sense, it is very peculiar. He has clearly taken all he possessed. Why should the blanket remain? No holes, no mice…Everything else is gone. Why leave this behind?”

“Perhaps he was determined to lighten his load.”

“That is possible. But there is something about it I do not like. Let us leave this wretched place.”

My friend’s expression was set and neutral as we retraced our steps, yet somehow it was as dejected as I had ever seen. But our time in that house would not end so quickly as we had imagined, for as we descended the last set of stairs, the outer door swung forward to reveal a hollow-eyed woman, thin and spindly but with fiery red hair, accompanied by two children whose paper-thin complexions loudly declared their ill health.

Holmes, to his credit, held the lamp so that she could clearly see us and relapsed immediately into the charming seafarer whose identity he had laboured so long to establish.

“Oh, dear God!” the woman cried at seeing two strangers in what were, presumably, her rooms.

“Now, don’t take on so,” Holmes began in his most hypnotic tones. “We’ve come to see a friend, but we mean you no harm. He ain’t here, so we’re making our way back out again.”

“What on earth do y’ mean skulking about in here at night?”

“We made a poor job of it—please accept our apologies, ma’am. My name is Escott, and this here is Middleton.”

“Timothy, Rebecca, go along to the room, now,” she breathed in the lilting tones of the northern Irish native. “Take yer bundle, and eat yer share.” When the children had run off clutching a small rag, she returned her gaze to my friend. “What’s yer business, then?”

“We only wished to see your lodger.”

“He owes you money, does he?”

“Nothing of the sort, ma’am.”

She crossed her arms. “You truly are friends o’ his, then? Or are you kin?”

My friend smiled. “I promise you we neither of us would dream of breaking into your house meaning any harm. We wanted a word with him, and that’s the end of it.”

“Well, you won’t be having a word with him now.”

“So it seemed to us upstairs,” Holmes acknowledged, his eyes as sharp as knife points in the moonlight. “And why not?”

“Because,” she said flatly, “if your friend is Johnny Blackstone, there’s not a soul as can speak to him this side of the grave. Johnny Blackstone is dead.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX The Lie

It was a great blessing for Holmes and me that we appeared in the character of Blackstone’s friends, for the stunned expression that flitted across both our faces thus required no explanation.

The woman’s thin lips parted sympathetically. “My name is Mrs. Quinn. I’ve naught to offer you for refreshment, as we’ve fallen lately upon some hard times. But if you’ve no objection to sitting a moment, I’ll make it all as clear to ye as I can.”

We thus found ourselves seated upon a pew in the well-kept but achingly bare room the Quinns shared. Similar pews lined the other three walls, scorched in places as if rescued from a fire, and a statue of the Virgin Mary whose cloak had half burned away sat majestically in a corner.

“Yer wondering at my furnishings,” Mrs. Quinn observed. “There was a great fire at one of the chapels hereabouts some years ago, when Mr. Quinn was still alive. Much of it was piled up for burning, but my Colin, he said the Lord would be grieved to see us wi’out so much as a stone to sit on, and here He’s provided us wi’ benches that would remind us of His goodness every day.

“Wi’out Mr. Quinn these five years, times has gotten steadily worse, and I’d taken the notion of bringing in extra lodgers. God forgive me for saying since his death this house has seemed as cursed as any I’ve ever heard tell of back home. The first family lived happily enough upstairs before their eldest daughter took sick. The Connellys they were called, the six of ’em. Wasn’t long before Katie’d spread the pox to the others, and it was all I could do to keep ’em supplied with hot water and linens wi’out exposing our family to the sickness. After four of ’em had died, the other two just disappeared into the night. I’ve been wanting to rent the room again, for it’s months since they’ve gone, but the notion of cleaning it is a hard one, for I’ve more knowledge of how these things are passed than most, and I’ve a mortal terror of taking sick with Tim and Rebecca to think of.

“The other chamber was near enough destroyed when a kerosene lamp fell from a table, but I still had the attic room, and last August I rented it to yer friend, Johnny Blackstone, just after the Connellys all vanished. I think he liked this house, for it was so easy for him to be alone, and I hardly ever saw him from one day to the next. Whenever we did meet, often as not I’d have the little ones in tow, and he’d laugh at the sight of ’em. He’d leave treats for ’em at the foot of the stairs—harmless things, boats he’d made, and paper dolls and the like. But he always seemed in a hurry to be quit of us and would strike off for one of his dens, or run upstairs to smoke that foul pipe of his, and so it was that when he died last week, I never noticed for well-nigh three days’ time. God forgive me for it.”

“How did he die, Mrs. Quinn?”

“He hanged himself, Mr. Escott,” she replied, her round hazel eyes brimming with tears.

Holmes and I regarded her with unfeigned horror, but she swiftly recovered her self-possession.

“The parish men took his body and performed a pauper’s burial. I cast about a bit for any as knew him, but when none did, I came to think how he’d been behind in his rent, and the washing I take in hasn’t been near enough, and winter just beginning. I pawned the lot of his things today when I’d done delivering my washing, Mr. Escott. All but the blanket, for we need another one.”

“Mrs. Quinn, though I don’t like asking you to think on such things, was there any sign of why a young fellow like Blackstone might have taken his own life? Something in the lot you pawned, for instance?”

“There was nothing like that save for a letter. I believe it’s for his sister. I’d have mailed it sooner, but I’ve only just gotten the postage from the goods I pawned.”

She brought the letter and placed it upon the table. Holmes did not so much as glance at it but regarded Mrs. Quinn with an admirable display of buried grief.

“Forgive me—Blackstone’s death has come as a powerful blow to us, you must understand. That he had fallen upon evil days I knew, but that he ever entertained the notion of taking his own life…well, my mate may be beyond help, Mrs. Quinn, but I can at least set his affairs in order. What did he owe you beyond what you took in from pawning his goods?”

“Three and sixpence, Mr. Escott.”

“Here is a crown, then, for his rent and the interest. As for his goods, you’ve saved us from dealing with them.” As we arose and shook hands with Mrs. Quinn, Holmes’s eyes at last fell upon the letter. “Might I have the honour of posting this, Mrs. Quinn? Surely all the proceeds from his kit ought to be your own.”

“I should be glad if you would do so. Thank you both for yer kindness. I am sure Mr. Blackstone sees it and is grateful.”

We took our leave of Mrs. Quinn’s ruinous house, the outside air tinged with spent powder and woodsmoke. My friend tucked the letter in his inner pocket, and we marched without a word exchanged between us back to Scarborough Street and up the precarious stairs to Holmes’s room.

Though I could see from the detective’s first glance at the address that something deeply troubled him, he proceeded with mechanical aplomb, carefully slitting it open only after he had exhausted the envelope. He glanced at the handwriting within, then promptly passed it to me and sat upon the orange crate with the tips of his fingers pressed before his nearly closed eyes.

“Read it.”

The message, written in a great, driving script on four one-sided sheets, went as follows:

My dearest Lily,

You must be very angry with me for having hidden myself away all this time, but I fear once I have told you the reason for it, you’ll be glad enough never to lay eyes on your brother again. How I’ve missed you, and Peter, and the little ones. Whatever you do, please don’t tell the children of this letter. Say I had to go back to war. Say anything. I couldn’t bear it if they were afraid of their uncle, even after the evil I’ve done. The thought that they will remember me as the man I wished to be always—but you won’t tell them, Lily. That’s a comfort to me. Maybe it’s the only one I have left.

You remember, when we were young ourselves, once in a great while I lost my wits a little. I even struck you, my darling sister, as hard as ever I could, and you only six at the time. Can you remember it still? Your lip bled and you hid from me, and after father dealt with me, I spent every spare hour in the barn for a week making you dolls out of straw so that you would forgive me. I swore I’d never fall into such a rage again.

There was a fellow in Egypt—never mind him, he came out of it all right, but we had been mates and it was never the same afterwards. And another chap after we’d come back to Plymouth who tried to cheat me at cards. I thought the opium helped make me quieter, but soon enough I saw it wasn’t any real good.

I’ve come to the part I would rather cut off my arm than tell you, but if you’re ever to forgive me and still think of me with kindness when I’m gone, you have to know the whole truth of it, for I can’t bear any more of this sham. There was a girl. We’d walked down an alley together and had hardly been there ten minutes before it happened. She said something wicked to me—no woman ought to say such a thing to a man. I was drunk, and all I could feel was that black rage burning a hole in my chest, and by the work of some devil, my bayonet was in my hand. It was over in a moment. She looked almost sad at what I’d done. I heard the sound of footsteps coming toward us, and I didn’t stop running until I fell in a ditch, where I lay until morning, and a ditch is where I’ve lived, body and soul, ever since.

I don’t deserve to see you again, and I can’t be trusted with the girls. Maybe I’ve spent time enough in a deep enough Hell since it happened that God will forgive me—or maybe there’ll be nothing anymore, just quiet, and maybe I want that most of all.

Johnny

We sat in silence for some time. I knew nothing of what Holmes was thinking, but my own mind was in a whirl. It was a terrible admission, a nightmare of guilt and self-recrimination, but knowing as much as Holmes and I did, also grossly inaccurate. Could Blackstone have fallen into such a murderous trance that he had forgotten stabbing Martha Tabram beyond all bounds of sanity? I reminded myself that his sister’s opinion was paramount to him, but it beggared belief that he would admit to a murder and then promptly obscure the manner of it.

And where, if his deranged mind even knew of them, was mention of the other killings? My friend had hinted at every opportunity that he thought this man Blackstone to be none other than Jack the Ripper. His insistence that the Tabram case was our starting point, his preoccupation with uniforms, his tolerance of Dunlevy’s spying, the very weeks he had spent in the East-end: all pointed irrevocably to Blackstone’s assumed guilt. But if he had been the culprit, were our troubles now at an end? If all five grisly murders were upon his shoulders, the confession I still held listlessly in my hand was nothing more than a monstrous lie, or else the ravings of a man so delusional that he had forgotten the bulk of his wrongdoing. So much was clear to me and yet allowed room for still one more intolerable scenario to present itself. Suppose that Sherlock Holmes had been wrong?

I stirred myself to regard my friend, who remained in the exact posture he had assumed when I began the letter. Relaxed and immobile, he could have remained perfectly still, perhaps for hours, outwardly catatonic while his mind grappled rarefied data into hard fact. Instead, he spoke.

“You know what it means, don’t you?” he asked, his tone still reflecting the distant, incisive diction of the pure reasoner.

“I can hardly make head or tail of it. It complicates things immensely.”

“On the contrary, it simplifies them a thousand times over.”

“But my dear Holmes, how can that be possible?”

“Because now we know,” he said softly, “that someone is lying.”

I could think of nothing to say. Holmes fell back into thought, drumming his long fingers against one another until a startled expression darted across his features.

“A killing stab with a bayonet, and thirty-eight more wounds with a common pocketknife. Dear God, it is as clear as day. Where is Miss Monk?”

“I do not know. Dunlevy escorted her home yesterday. He is more taken with her than ever.”

“Is she likely to be with Dunlevy still?”

“I could not tell you. Her loathing of the fellow certainly seems to have lessened somewhat. But Holmes—”

Holmes, already in his coat, his muffler a whirl of red as he made for the door, made no reply. His haste sent a sharp sliver of unease shooting down my spine as I scrambled after him.

We set off at a rapid pace down the street, dappled everywhere with the orange light of exultant bonfires, but whether we made for Stephen Dunlevy’s abode or Miss Monk’s rooms I could not say. As we walked, Holmes stared unseeingly with his head sunk upon his chest whilst I fought to prevent myself picturing Miss Monk lying cold and open-eyed in an alleyway. Within a few minutes, we passed the now familiar sight of the Leman Street police station, its stoic lights casting icy blue shafts through their casements of marine-coloured glass. Excepting the Bow Street station, which Her Majesty considered too close to the opera house to broadcast its existence so palpably, each Metropolitan outpost proclaimed itself a haven by its shimmering cobalt lamps.

“When one considers the police presence in the East-end, it is positively unthinkable that so many lives have been lost to this madman.”

To my utmost surprise, for I had hardly noted my muttered remark had been made aloud, Holmes stopped dead in his tracks.

“What do you mean, Watson?”

“Well,” I faltered, “the security in Whitechapel must be at its most stringent in history. Every available man has been diverted to guard the area. There ought to be dozens of them at any given time—though of course I’ve no notion of how they organize their beats.”

“Beats are between one and one-and-one-half miles long, generally requiring a minimum of ten and a maximum of fifteen minutes to traverse, barring any time-consuming incident. They do not overlap, though their routes do bring them into contact at their perimeters with other constables. Stopping for any reason other than suspicion a crime has been committed is expressly forbidden, though many officers keep a flask of tea warming at a gas lamp somewhere along their path.”

He began to pace slowly beside the police station, one hand lightly beating against the adjacent brick wall. “Watson, a deranged man kills five separate women, all in the same small area of London. Instead of fleeing the scene, he remains with the corpses in a state of perfect calm and goes about the business of cutting them open. Once finished with his task, he makes his way to safety as invisibly as a ghost…No, no, no. As I have stated it, it is impossible. Fool that I am!” he cried. “Why did I not see at once that it is impossible? The alleys, the byways, the holes in the fences, the cat’s meat and the blood-strewn butcheries and the wretched light, all these factors seemed to have allowed this madman to work with impunity. And yet the acts he has committed cannot have been enabled simply by his environment. Once or twice, perhaps, luck may have been on his side, but his success at this late date beggars belief. He is cunning and ruthless. Why would he risk everything to chance?”