Portrait of a Killer Read Online Free PDF Page B

vulnerable to hypothermia. It was the habit of Unfortunates to walk about in everything they owned. If one did not have a permanent residence, to leave belongings in a lodging house was to lose them to a thief.
    The late hour was lively and alcohol flowed freely as Londoners stretched out what was left of their day off from labor. Most plays and musicals had begun at 8:15 and would have let out by now, and many theatergoers and other adventurers in horse-drawn taxis and on foot braved the mist-shrouded streets in search of refreshment and other entertainment. Visibility in the East End was poor under the best conditions. Gaslights were few and spaced far apart. They gave out smudges of illumination, and shadows were impenetrable. It was the world of the Unfortunate, a continuum of sleeping away days and getting up to drink before venturing out into another numbing night of sordid and dangerous employment.
    Fog made no difference unless the pollution was especially high and the acrid air stung the eyes and lungs. At least when it was foggy, one didn’t have to notice whether a client was pleasant in appearance or even see his face. Nothing about the client mattered anyway, unless he was inclined to take a personal interest in an Unfortunate and supply her with room and food. Then he was of consequence, but virtually no client was of consequence when one was past her prime, dirty, dressed like a pauper, and scarred or missing teeth. Martha Tabran preferred to dissolve into the mist and get it over with for a farthing, another drink, and maybe another farthing and a bed.
    The events leading to her murder are well documented and considered reliable unless one is inclined to feel, as I do, that the recollections of a hard-drinking prostitute named Pearly Poll might lack a certain clarity and veracity. If she didn’t outright lie when she was interviewed by the police and later when she testified at the coroner’s inquest on August 23rd, she was probably confused and suffering from alcohol-induced amnesia. Pearly Poll was frightened. She told police she was so upset that she might just drown herself in the Thames.
    During the inquest, Pearly Poll was reminded several times that she was under oath as she testified that on August 6th, at 10:00 P.M., she and Martha Tabran began drinking with two soldiers in Whitechapel. The couples went their separate ways at 11:45. Pearly Poll told the coroner and jurors that she went up Angel Court with the “corporal,” while Martha headed toward George Yard with the “private,” and that both soldiers wore white bands around their caps. The last time Pearly Poll saw Martha and the private, they were walking toward the dilapidated tenement housing of George Yard Buildings on Commercial Street, in the dark heart of East End slums. Pearly Poll claimed nothing out of the ordinary happened while she had been with Martha that night. Their encounter with the soldiers had been pleasant enough. There had been no fighting or arguments, nothing at all that might have set off even the faintest alarm in either Pearly Poll or Martha, who certainly had seen it all and had survived the streets a long time for good reason.
    Pearly Poll claimed to know nothing about what happened to Martha after 11:45 P.M., nor is there any record of what Pearly Poll herself was up to after she slipped away with her corporal for “immoral purposes.” When she learned that Martha had been murdered, Pearly Poll might have had cause to worry about her own welfare and to think twice about giving too much information to the coppers. She wouldn’t put it past those boys in blue to listen to her story and then send her to prison as “a scapegoat for five thousand of her class.” Pearly Poll was to stick to her story: She had ended up in Angel Court, a good mile’s walk from where she left Martha, and inside the City of London. The City was not under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan