Free Complete History of Jack the Ripper by Philip Sudgen Page A

appeared at the mortuary looking very gentlemanly and dignified, but when the lid of the coffin was removed and he saw the dead face of his wife he was much affected. ‘I forgive you, as you are,’ he told her, ‘for what you have been to me.’ And Polly’s friend Ellen Holland was greatly moved by her death. At the inquest proceedings of 3 September the following exchange took place between her and Mr Horey, the foreman of the jury:
    Mr HOREY: ‘What name did you know her by?’
    Mrs HOLLAND: ‘Only as “Polly”.’
    Mr HOREY: ‘You were the first one to identify her?’
    Mrs HOLLAND: ‘Yes, sir.’
    Mr HOREY: ‘Were you crying when you identified her?’
    Mrs HOLLAND: ‘Yes, and it was enough to make anybody shed a tear, sir.’ 8
     
    Inspector Reid, Head of CID in H Division, had conducted the investigation into the George Yard murder. The body of Polly Nichols, however, had been discovered within the jurisdiction of the newly created J or Bethnal Green Division and Inspector Joseph Helson, Reid’s counterpart in Bethnal Green, took charge of the inquiry. This third murder of an East End prostitute, moreover, evoked a response from Scotland Yard in the portly form of Inspector Frederick George Abberline.
    Police records describe Abberline as a fresh-complexioned man, five feet nine and a half inches in height, with dark-brown hair and hazel eyes. In 1888, it might equally truthfully have been said, he was forty-five and overweight, his thick moustache and bushy side-whiskers serving to accentuate the balding condition of his pate. Modest and soft-spoken, he reminded Walter Dew more of a bank manager or a solicitor than a detective-inspector first class. But Abberline’s track record befitted his rank. He had served twenty-five years in the Metropolitan Police, fourteen of them in the slums of Whitechapel. And during his years as H Division’s ‘Local Inspector’ (1878–1887) he had built up an unrivalled knowledge ofthe East End and its villains and his even-handed and meticulous methods of work had won him the admiration and affection of his colleagues. In December 1887, after Abberline had been transferred to Scotland Yard at the express wish of James Monro and Adolphus Williamson, Assistant Commissioner (CID) and Chief Constable (CID) respectively, a large company of Whitechapel citizens and ex-colleagues gathered to honour him with a presentation dinner at the Unicorn Tavern in Shoreditch. George Hay Young then spoke of him as ‘the very ideal of a faithful, conscientious and upright officer’ and Superintendent Arnold, Head of H Division, lamented Abberline’s loss to Whitechapel ‘for a better officer there could not be.’ They presented him with a gold keyless hunting watch inscribed: ‘Presented, together with a purse of gold, to Inspector F. G. Abberline by the inhabitants of Spitalfields, Whitechapel, etc., on his leaving the district after fourteen years’ service, as a mark of their esteem and regard.’ 9 But Abberline was not out of the district for long. Ability and experience alike qualified him to investigate the Whitechapel murders. Hence it was, that in the autumn of 1888, he was sent to the East End to co-ordinate the work of the divisional detectives. In the ensuing months no officer would be more intimately involved in the investigation of the crimes. Few indeed would acquire such an encyclopaedic knowledge of the case.
    The most strenuous efforts of Abberline and the detectives of J Division, however, yielded not the slightest clue to the identity of Polly Nichols’ murderer.
    The Buck’s Row killer had left nothing except Polly’s body to mark his passing. On the day of the murder several officers searched Buck’s Row and its vicinity. Between five and six in the morning Spratling sent PC Thain to examine all the premises near the spot where the body had been found. The constable subsequently told the inquest that he ‘searched Essex Wharf, the Great Eastern Railway,