Free What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen Page B

sorts who were constantly on hand to carry his bags or serve him his meals. He was convinced he had the broader, more ecumenical view of human nature, despite the fact that William saw himself as the man of the people.
    The brothers took a hansom cab to George Yard, where Martha Tabram had been stabbed two dozen times. William had the address of one Rosie Tynan, who had told the police she saw someone she thought was Martha speaking to a gentleman on the evening of the murder. Rosie Tynan’s house was empty, and the neighbors had, like vultures over a corpse, descended to take it apart. The glass in the windows was gone; the steps broken up; the shutters pulled off. William knocked on the house next door, where a disheveled woman, gripping a crying child tightly by the arm, informed him curtly that Rosie had left the area. “Went south ’cause she got sick of it all,” said the woman, motioning with her free hand to the area around her. “Don’t know if it’s better where she is, but it coulden be worse.”
    “Did she ever talk to you about seeing Martha Tabram before her death?” asked William.
    “Naw,” said the woman. “She hardly knew what she seen, and the police badgered her till she knew less. That’s what they do; they get hold of something they think will make things easy for them, and then they try to make you say what they want. Rosie seen nothing but some woman, who she thought might be Martha, speaking to some gentleman near the corner by the pub. Martha spoke to gentlemen all the time; it was her living.” The child began to cry loudly, and the woman paused to pinch its arm, along which there was already a string of bright purple bruises. “You woulden learn no more from her than you done from me.”
    Leaving George Yard, William and Henry walked farther east to the upper end of Whitechapel Road to look for Patrick Mulshaw, who had said he saw someone suspicious near the site of the Polly Nichols’s murder. Mulshaw, however, was gone too, according to a man standing at the corner with a tray, on which were arranged an assortment of tobacco butts. “Who knows where he’s at?” The man shrugged. “Probably went up to Belfast. Pat said there weren no point hangin’ round here; he’d do as well to starve to death with his own people.”
    William looked at the informant, whom he realized was in a striking state of emaciation and whose livelihood apparently was made by selling the cigarette butts that he picked up from the street. William put a pound on the tray and hurried off, only to have his brother catch up with him a few minutes later, breathing heavily.
    “That was very rude of you!” exclaimed Henry with annoyance.
    “Giving the poor man money?”
    “Running off and leaving me there to deal with his excess of gratitude. He took hold of my waistcoat and wouldn’t let go. Wanted me to take all his cigarette butts, and I had to assure him that we were Americans and didn’t smoke. Next time you want to be altruistic, please don’t leave me holding the bucket—or, as it were, the butts.”
    During the next hour, the brothers wandered through the area, where none of the witnesses associated with the Annie Chapman or Elizabeth Stride murders could be found, though they did unearth a young woman who had gone to dinner with Catherine Eddowes early in the evening of her murder and who said that there had not been any rendezvous arranged for later, as far as she knew. “Katie met her gentlemen where she could, and took care of business on the spot,” the woman asserted. “It wasn’t her way to plan ahead.”
    William fleetingly wondered if the failure to plan ahead in such matters was another facet of what the great Darwin would argue served to winnow the species of its less adaptable specimens.
    As the brothers moved through the neighborhood, William noted that Henry remained quiet. Not that there was anything for him to say, but since when had that ever stopped him before? Occasionally