Free Castle Rouge by Carole Nelson Douglas

some few areas in which I am personally deficient and that they probably intersected here, to my chagrin and to the death of that woman, Elizabeth Stride. Chagrin, I am convinced, falls far lower on St. Peter’s list of failings than unnecessary death. It is lucky that I do not believe in such postmortem fairy tales.”
    I did not know what to say. I had seen Holmes perplexed, Holmes afire with the hunt, Holmes triumphant. I had never seen Holmes humble, and I suspected that this was as close as I would ever come in my lifetime.
    He gazed at the street opposite. “No woman killed in Whitechapel, Watson, during or before or after the Ripper’s reign, was seen with so many men of varying appearance as Elizabeth Stride, this forty-four-year-old unfortunate who was missing two front teeth. I saw her with one myself, though I don’t believe I can afford to discount the earlier men who crossed her path, some quite intimately, according to witnesses. From the testimony, there was a cordiality to the encounters that quite surprises me. Perhaps you can explain.”
    “It is a game, Holmes. The woman pretends interest in the man, she flatters and flirts. What she wants is the coins that will ease her life for a few hours, whether spent on beer or a bed indoors at a doss house. Usually she is so drunk she scarce knows what she is doing. So is he.”
    “A fine advertisement for such transactions, Watson. I have seen more personal interchanges in an opium den.”
    “Both parties in such exchanges are benighted, miserable souls, Holmes. All the world knows that. Still, the great cities of that world support ten thousands of prostitutes and many times more men to patronize them. It is a ritual as old as earth.”
    “No doubt why those stars and moons and planets keep such a wide berth of our own globe. Take yourself back to that night of twenty-nine September last year, Watson. By sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 P.M. Elizabeth Stride had earned sixpence through some cleaning work. She planned further and more profitable expeditions, for she borrowed a clothes brush from Charles Preston, a barber, and left a piece of velvet with Catharine Lane, a charwoman, two friends she encountered at Flower and Dean Street.
    “By 11:00 P.M. , two laborers saw her lingering with a man outside the Bricklayer’s Arms pub in Settle Street as they entered. They were surprised that the couple were hugging and kissing in the open. The man was too respectably dressed for such behavior: smart black morning suit and coat, billycock hat, black mustache, about five-foot-five.”
    I nodded, seeing the picture painted like a scene in a play.
    “The workmen couldn’t resist taunting the woman. The man with her, they teased, resembled Leather Apron.”
    “Leather Apron! Good God, Holmes, quite a chilling fellow. He was one of the earliest suspects in the Ripper murders.”
    “One of the earliest and the least likely, save that he had all the earmarks of a suspect made to order for the press to convict in print, which they are even better at than Scotland Yard detectives are at letting the guilty go. Although, in this instance, I behaved remarkably like Scotland Yard’s finest,” he finished bitterly.
    Holmes would indeed be chagrined with himself for committing the same blunders for which he so often berailed officialdom.
    “This man did appear in the streets in a Leather Apron and when arrested was found to keep several nasty knives at home, was he not?” I asked.
    “Indeed. He was a bootmaker, hence the apron and possibly the long knives at home. He bullied the ladies of the night, no doubt, and was Jewish. Worst of all, his name was Jack. Jack Pizer. He was the sort of neighborhood bogeyman that the police and press could wish for, a ‘crazy Jew’ to throw to the mob and the police courts, with a nickname created to terrify women and children in their beds,” Holmes finished almost contemptuously.
    “I can’t deny that I would seize upon such a