Free Jack The Ripper: Newly Discovered Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Holy Ghost Writer

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CHAPTER Eleven
    Outside Insides
     
    On November 9, at about 10:45 A.M., John McCarthy, owner of Miller’s Court, sent Thomas Bowyer to collect past rent from one of his tenants. He knocked at the door several times and noticed that the door was not locked. He pushed it open, calling the tenant’s name, but no response came from within. He stepped into the room and saw a horrific sight: a dead body lying on the bed in a huge pool of blood. Mr. Bowyer turned and ran to tell his boss. The police were notified immediately.
    The first policeman to arrive had to be helped out of the room. He became violently ill and was too shaken to stand on his own. The rest of the officers arrived shortly and squeezed into the tiny room; Holmes was among them.
    His eyes scanned the room methodically; he saw that the woman’s clothing was neatly folded on a chair. Her shoes were paired neatly in front of the fireplace. She had on only her underclothes. That is, what was left of them after all the shredding the knife had done.
    The dead woman, Holmes learned from a neighbor, was Mary Jane Kelly, twenty-five years of age. She was about five feet seven inches tall, stout, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. She was somewhat younger than the other victims and had been killed in a residence rather than on the street, but Holmes still had the feeling this was Jack’s work—the state of the body, viciously mutilated, attested to that.
    Holmes had already explored the room the best he could to see if there was anything of a personal nature in the room. He was also quite pleased at all the untouched surfaces in the room, and took his time dusting the table, chairs, and other objects for fingerprints.
    At the end of his explorations he found, lying partway under the victim’s body, the thumb section of a glove. A doctor’s glove? He turned it over to a detective, thinking to himself that this was one more clue that the murderer was in the medical profession.
    Holmes decided to use this time to visit the neighbors and see if he could find out anything about the poor woman’s last hours. This should make the investigation go a little faster, since most of the witnesses were in one rooming house.
    Holmes stopped a uniformed policeman. “You can be of immense help to this investigation,” he said, handing the man his notebook. “Please come along with me and take notes as I interview possible witnesses—that way, I can focus on my questions and the answers. Write down your own impressions, too—there could be one hundred men watching an interview and each would observe something different.”
    Within a few hours, Holmes found out that Mary Jane was a nice, quiet woman who was well-liked by others. Though she could become boisterous when drinking, for the most part she never caused any trouble and got along well with everyone.
    Lizzie Albrook, a neighbor, told of her last interactions with Mary Jane. “We were together last night at the bar. We had quite a long talk about life. She told me not to end up as she had. She was sad that her life was what it was, and she wished she could go to Ireland to live with family. She had to resort to her kind of life so she wouldn’t starve,” Lizzie said. “We parted when a man appeared at her side. I couldn’t tell you anything about him though, because I had someone myself.”
    “Thank you, Miss Albrook. If you think of anything else, please let us know,” Holmes said as he passed her his card.
    Mary Ann Cox was another neighbor who readily answered the questions put to her. She offered Holmes and his assistant a cup of tea, which they refused.
    “When did you last see the victim?” Holmes asked.
    “It was last night. I was walking home and she was walking in front of me with a man. They went into her room and I wished them goodnight.”
    “How did she act?”
    “She looked intoxicated, to be honest, but she did bid me goodnight. I thought it