Free The Return of Moriarty by John E. Gardner

Professor for the slightest favor, anxious to serve him with exceptional loyalty because of the many ways he could alleviate the deprivations and ills that surrounded them, willing to provide intelligence for minor amounts of cash or food. Indeed, it was well known to the floating populace of this part of London, east of the City, that Professor Moriarty’s converts were better cared for and more numerous than those made by the zealous Christian Socialists, who periodically descended on the area, dispensing charitable works from places like Toynbee Hall.
    Indeed, there was much high-flown talk about redevelopment plans, and renewed social work around Whitechapel and Spitalfields, but, Moriarty thanked Satan, little was actually done. Then, in the autumn of 1888, Moriarty’s rich recruiting ground became a place of real terror, its lanes, streets, courts and alleys coming under the scrutiny of the police magnifying glass and the concern of the public at large.
    At that time Moriarty lived in earnest comfort, nearer the West End, in a large house off the Strand. Both Paget and Spear were with him, lodged in style within the servants’ quarters whence they worked with various other members of the Moriarty mob.
    It was Spear who brought the first news of the trouble about to break upon them from Whitechapel. He had been out on business, as it happened, on a punitive action against some rampers who had been causing Sally Hodges a little bother and, having left on the previous evening, did not return until nearly eleven on the morning of Friday, August 31. He went straight to the Professor’s office on the first floor and announced, “Polly Nicholls has had her throat cut. They found her in Buck’s Row, half-three this morning.”
    The upper hierarchy of Moriarty’s mob knew Polly Nicholls, a drab, sallow-complexioned, mousy woman of forty-two, who had sunk, through her predilection for alcohol, to the lowest depths of eastern London, making what little money she could on the streets and living hand to mouth in the lodging houses. But she had, on one or two occasions, been of use to Moriarty and his cohorts by passing information, mainly of a simple nature.
    â€œWe are going to have to take stronger measures with the High Rips,” was Moriarty’s first reaction. “That is the fourth since last Christmas.”
    That Moriarty himself had people working the High Rip, a bullying, sometimes violent, form of extortion from prostitutes, had no bearing on the matter. They were all aware that youthful gangs, including the Hoxton Market and Old Nichol Street mobs, had been working the High Rip in the Whitechapel and Spitalfields districts.
    Moriarty’s mention of Polly Nicholls being the fourth victim of fatal High Rip operations since Christmas concerned three other whores. Fairy Fay, whose real identity still remained hidden, was a woman whose body, horribly cut up, had been found near the Commercial Road on the previous Boxing Night; Emma Smith, badly assaulted by three men on Easter Monday, April 13, later died of her injuries, and Martha Tabram, found dead in almost the same spot as Emma Smith—in Osborn Street, Spitalfields—stabbed thirty-nine times in the early hours of August 7, only a little over two weeks before the discovery of the ill-fated Polly Nicholls.
    Spear and Paget put the known High Rip mobs on the top of their list, but a week later things took a new turn when the body of yet another whore, Annie Chapman—Dark Annie, as she was known—was found, throat cut and stomach multilated in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street.
    It was at this point that Moriarty became badly inconvenienced, as it was soon apparent that Annie Chapman’s killer and whoever had slit Polly Nicholls’ throat were one and the same person, while something akin to panic began to grip the Professor’s territory. But there was more—the terror that lurked behind garbled tales