George Mann - Associates of Sherlock Holmes

“Amusing, Holmes,” I said, pulling up my collar as the rain grew heavier. I let him do his work, for as much as the man irritated me in his manner, I had never in all my experience met a keener or more accomplished mind. “What should I see?”

“For a start, you have not complimented Dr Watson on his fine attire. From Savile Row, no less. Isn’t that right, Doctor.”

“Holmes…” said Watson. I heard the warning in his tone but also noticed the doctor’s fine tailoring. “Only the gloves are new,” he confessed.

“Look expensive,” I muttered, ruefully.

“A flutter on the ponies, wasn’t it Watson? A rare triumph?”

Watson’s cheeks reddened. “Holmes!”

To this day, I cannot fathom how the doctor puts up with him.

“Enough games, Holmes,” I told him, “what have you found?”

“In the first instance, this,” he said, removing something from Goose’s person and holding it up to the meagre light.

“A key?” I said.

“Well observed, Inspector, though the question is: what does it open?”

It was small, and made of brass, though had little to distinguish it.

“Is that it, then?”

Holmes’s mood darkened. “Far from it, Inspector. I see a workhouse porter and a curious predilection, I believe.” He stood, looking down grimly at the man. “Lestrade, if your constable would be so kind as to turn over the body…”

I nodded to Metcalfe and he reluctantly crouched, kneeling in the blood that had pooled around the man’s head. Made heavy by death and his sodden clothes, the corpse proved difficult for Metcalfe to turn but when he finally did, he gagged.

I felt a coldness seep into my gut in that moment that even my outrage could not thaw.

Metcalfe gasped. “Good Lord in heaven…”

The man had no face. His skin had been completely removed and only the red, glistening muscle remained.

“What is this, Holmes?” I asked, surprised that I rasped the words.

“Something foul, I fear, Inspector.”

I almost dared not ask: “A devotee? Inspired by Whitechapel?”

“No, Inspector,” said Holmes, “I think not. The victim, the method… this is altogether something else.”

“Are there no depths to which man’s depravity will not stoop?” said Watson. “Holmes, what need could one have for flesh taken in such a manner?”

“That, Watson, is something I intend to find out.”

I returned to Scotland Yard in a Black Maria with the body. Holmes and Watson followed, but only after Holmes had lingered to make his observations. Diverted as I was by preliminary paperwork, both were waiting for me as I entered the morgue.

Holmes remained in the corner of the room throughout, swallowed in shadow like some wraith, a plume of pale blue smoke issuing from his short briar pipe. He leaned against the wall casually, though I could see little cause to behave thusly, and I was reminded again of how unlike anyone else Holmes is.

“Inspector,” said Watson, standing by the slab where the faceless man now lay. A veil had been placed over the remains of his face so as to conceal his grim affliction, though the rest of his body was naked and stitched from clavicle to sternum.

“Jeremiah Goose,” I said, reading from the report I had been in the middle of compiling. I had sent several constables out to canvas the streets where the murder took place, and someone had seen and recognised Goose but had not borne witness to the deed that had sent him to the morgue.

“A porter at the Alderbrook Workhouse on Lower Thames Street,” said Holmes, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “I would say I knew him by his face, but that would be mildly indelicate given Mr Goose’s current disposition.”

“Heaven forefend you come across as indelicate, Mr Holmes,” said I, turning to Watson. “What do you make of the pathologist’s report, Doctor?”

“A single blow, just forward of the right temple,” said Watson. He gestured to the point where the skull had been cracked open. “Killed him instantly.”

“What else?” asked Holmes.

“The blow came from the front, so the killer was facing his victim. The pathologist found no defensive wounds, no bruising or lacerations of any kind, and neither can I, so we can assume our victim knew his attacker or had no cause to believe he was in danger.”

“Indeed,” muttered Holmes, “and you Lestrade? Have you any morsel to offer towards our understanding of what transpired?”

“A single blow, you say, Doctor?”

Watson nodded.

“Then the killer must be a man of not inconsiderable size and, presumably, height. Mr Goose must be…”

“Six foot, five inches and approximately one hundred and ninety-eight pounds,” said Watson, consulting the pathologist’s report. “A large man.”

“So we might assume our killer was at least as large, if not larger,” I said. “But why take this poor wretch’s face?”

“Why, indeed,” said Holmes.

“We’ll learn little more from Mr Goose, I think.”

“I would have to agree,” said Watson.

I nodded, swallowing back the bitter tang of ammonia itching the back of my throat. “Well, I don’t know about you gents, but I need some air.”

I have neither the inspiration of Holmes nor the education of Watson, but I am still an inspector of Scotland Yard, and what I might lack in cognitive faculty I more than make up for in a dogged determination to see justice prevail.

With nothing further to learn from Jeremiah Goose’s body, I fell back on police work. Whilst Holmes and Watson departed the Yard to conduct their own investigations, I took Metcalfe, Cooper and Barrows to follow up on the one lead I knew we had.

But by the time we got to Lower Thames Street, Alderbrook Workhouse was already burning.

The old building had gone up like dry tinder, the smoke visible across the Thames as far as Leathermarket. Six engines circled the blaze, the firemen struggling to contain it. I saw a constable too, no doubt alerted by the shouts of passers-by, but he was on the other side of the fire and I only saw him through the heat haze. Something about his manner seemed odd, the way he just looked on at the flames, but then what else could we all do?

I stood, my officers beside me, and watched as whatever evidence may have been contained within was destroyed by the conflagration. I felt the fire on my face, such was the sheer heat, and pressed a handkerchief against my nose and mouth to keep out the smoke.

“There’ll be nothing but a gutted ruin once this is done,” remarked Metcalfe. I smelled something other than smoke too, and knew that not everyone within had escaped.

“What now, Inspector?”

I didn’t answer straight away. Unless Holmes has found some further thread that he had yet to avail me of, I had no further leads to follow. “Question everyone at this scene,” I told them. “Get help if you need to.” I looked for the constable I had spotted earlier but couldn’t see him through the smoke. “I’m off back to the Yard.” I was angry at my own impotence and the knowledge that I was at the mercy of the killer, my only choice to wait until he killed again.

As it turned out, I did not have to wait long.

Unlike the first murder victim, the dead girl was lying on her back, not far from the Fenchurch Station, but in kind with the first, her skin had been flensed off. By the time I arrived, four constables were warning off the riffraff and Sergeant Metcalfe met me as before.

“Have you sent someone for Holmes?” I asked immediately.

Dragged to a side street cluttered with refuse and punctuated by the back entrances of shops and emporiums, the dead girl looked like she had tried to put up a struggle. She’d been hidden, at least partly, a dirty blanket laid across her legs and abdomen.