Free Castle Rouge by Carole Nelson Douglas Page B

Eight-and-twenty years old—note the precision of the professional observer—dark complexion, dark mustache; wearing a black diagonal cutaway coat, hard felt hat, white collar and tie.”
    “More than smart, a dandy.”
    “And carrying a parcel wrapped in newsprint six-to-eight-inches wide and eighteen-inches long.”
    “Well. Holmes, that was not fish and chips.”
    “No, Watson, that was not fish and chips. It was, in fact, the exact size and shape of a collection of knives useful for some impromptu street surgery, would you not say?”
    “I’d say so more surely could I see the contents. It might have contained only…kitchen utensils.”
    “Ah yes, a man might feel an urgent need to purchase such items to carry through all the kissing corridors of Whitechapel in the dark of night. What is interesting is that a resident who passed this location at virtually the same hour saw nothing.”
    I mused upon this. “There is the gate beside the International Working Men’s Educational Club. The couple could have ducked in there to transact business the moment PC Smith vanished.”
    Holmes nodded approval. “Just the sort of quick-witted insight on such matters I expected of you, Watson. However within five or ten minutes at 12:35 or 12:40, an innocent young man named Morris Eagle returned from seeing his lady friend home. I cannot tell you how encouraged I am, Watson, that such customs as seeing lady friends home do still occur in Whitechapel. He found the club’s front door locked because of the lateness of the hour and went through the side gate. He strolled the length of the passage and saw no one. There vanishes the possible escape route of the couple seen earlier, Watson.”
    I gazed up and down the street, seeking another byway they could have nipped into.
    “However,” Holmes said, “Mr. Eagle admitted it was very dark, and he could have missed seeing someone in the passage. At any rate,” he added casually, “I took up my post immediately after Mr. Eagle had passed, for I never saw him. And almost immediately, the street became a carnival again. I had arranged myself almost invisibly in this very spot when I looked up to see she who would shortly be identified as the dead body of Elizabeth Stride standing by Dutfield gateway. I have no idea how she came there. None! Even as I watched, a man came along the street and paused to talk to her. He was not any of the men witnesses would describe as having dallied with her previously.”
    “This is indeed a conundrum, Holmes.”
    “And this man was not the only stroller. Immediately another came by. The woman was wearing the red flower pinned to her black jacket that other witnesses mentioned. I saw it. The light is strong enough here for such details to leap into relief. Then events exploded into action.”
    I was now rapt in Holmes’s story. Standing here in the dark and the damp, under the thin rays of the mist-shrouded street lamp made me feel the presence of the many people who had passed by here that night eight months ago. I could smell the dusky scent of mildew and the greasy miasma of pub food. Was it cooking grease that spotted the newsprint wrapping the last man’s odd-shaped bundle…or blood? For a physician, I have an active imagination I try to disguise, but as a fictioneer my blood roars at the hint of a ripping good story!
    I know that Holmes most distrusts this tendency in me, so I keep it sternly leashed. He continued his tale.
    “This latest man with Stride was five-foot-five, thirty, dark hair, fair skin, small brown mustache. He was full in the face as a moon yet broad in the shoulders, like a laborer. He wore dark coat and trousers and peaked hat. He tried to pull the woman down into the street but managed only to spin her and cast her down on the footpath.
    “She…bleated, Watson. Like a sacrificial lamb. Three times, none of them loud. I didn’t know what to make of it. In any other place I would have rushed to the lady’s rescue,