The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Whitechapel Horrors Read Online Free PDF

far more eloquently than words.
    The ride was not a very long one, the East End of London beingseparated from the West End more by birthright than distance. It is a squalid, miserable place, a place not so much where one lives as survives, but not always and never easily.
    The jarvey, jaw firmly set, pulled up in front of the Whitechapel station of the underground railway, near Brady Street.
    “Ye’ll ‘ave to ‘oof it from ‘ere, gents, Metropolitan P’lice or no. I’ll not be taken yer lot any further, and that’s me last word!”
    Watson paid him double the fare anyway.
    The mortuary, located in Old Montague Street, was but a short walk, but it is a walk into a London few respectable Londoners even knew existed. The area of the East End known as Whitechapel, though in close proximity to the lofty sacred precincts of St. Paul’s, is a low and hellish place, and the few adjoining acres called Spitalfields, which they had now entered, is the lowest level of that hell. No more than a quarter-mile square, the darkened narrow streets and alleyways of Spitalfields contained the worst of London’s slums and the very lowest form of humanity. It had been fifty years since Charles Dickens had described the district in Oliver Twist , yet little had changed for the better, and not even someone with his powers of description could prepare the unwary for the worst of it. Spitalfields was a place that penetrated the soul with feelings of repulsion and dread. 8
    The stench from the streets was all but overpowering, a witches’ brew of smells: the familiar odors of poverty — garbage, excrement, boiled cabbage and decay, stale beer, cheap gin and unwashed bodies — was intermixed with the stink of coal gas which permeated everything, and the gagging vapors from the slaughterhouses and tanneries and small, run-down factories that were scattered about the area.
    They walked quickly, eyes to the ground, detouring when necessary around the occasional small clusters of vagrants, misshapen lumps sleeping huddled in doorways or against the building walls.
    Their arrival at the mortuary was almost a welcome relief; the smells there were merely of formaldehyde and lye, strong and gagging but somehow cleansing to the nostrils. Still it was no place for those with delicate stomachs or sensibilities. 9
    The darkened room into which they were ushered had bare brick walls that were whitewashed once but were now coated with grime and lampblack. What illumination there was came from wall sconces that seemed to give off more smoke than the sickly light, dancing eerily on the ceiling.
    The center of the room was taken up by several rectangular wooden tables, only one or two of which were bare. The others were draped with sheets of a rough material under which the lumpy shapes of cadavers reposed. Off to one side were a half dozen or so wicker baskets which at first glance in the dim light appeared to contain small bundles of dirty laundry. They contained the bodies of infants, the day’s collection.
    The four of them, Holmes and Watson and the two policemen, were escorted directly and without ceremony to one of the tables located at the far end of the room. A lantern was brought and the sheet pulled back.
    “She be identified as one Mary Anne Nicholls,” said a gravelly voice from the shadows, that of a mortuary worker. “Polly Nicholls, she be called, forty-two years old, mother of five, prostitute. Only known address be a doss-house at number 18 Thrawl Street.”
    The four of them stood around the table as if transfixed. The face they looked down upon was that of a homely, coarse-featured woman who appeared far older than the stated forty-two years. Her eyes were open.
    “Hold the light higher, please, someone!” ordered Holmes, his voice sounding unnaturally loud, even strident.
    The wound at the woman’s throat grinned grotesquely in the flickering light. The blood had been wiped away so the lesion wasplainly visible. The windpipe and