commenced to peruse the wooden box itself with his lens. Uttering a few murmured exclamations of satisfaction, and twice removing with tweezers small indications and placing them carefully on a piece of blotting paper, he worked until I was beside myself with curiosity over what the box actually contained.
At long last, he cautiously lifted the lid. Revealing only straw, he grasped a slender letter opener and with it disturbed the hay until he finally revealed a glint of silver.
Holmes frowned, covered his hand with a cloth, and reaching in, pulled out a small cigarette case. Turning it over under the light, he looked for traces on the surface of the metal, but the case appeared to be brand new. He tossed it on the table and drew out a short note, which read:
I stared in disbelief. “You lost your cigarette case when you encountered the killer! I distinctly remember your asking for mine.”
He did not answer.
“My dear Holmes, this is nonsensical. Why should he return you a cigarette case which is not your own?”
“Page torn from a notebook, standard pocket size, black ink, and with any luck…” He fetched a piece of graphite and ran it lightly over the surface of the note. He gave a cry of delight when a pattern revealed itself.
“What have you found?”
He passed me the scrap of notepaper with evident satisfaction and I squinted at the writing he had revealed:
“Holmes, what could this possibly mean?”
“It is an impression from the previous page. I confess I make nothing of it at the moment, but that surely does not mean it is beyond human imagining. No finger marks on either the paper or the case, which is very odd indeed and means he either wore gloves from its moment of purchase or else wiped it carefully. He is a collector of trophies, fair-haired, meticulous, and I doubt not that there is a stable very close to where he lives, for this hay has recently been in the immediate vicinity of a horse. He was in attendance at Catherine Eddowes’s interment today. And when he packed this box,” Holmes concluded triumphantly, “he was smoking a cigarette. The ash has fallen in the hay.” Scraping a flake of fluffy white ash onto another piece of blotting paper with the jackknife, the detective held up his lens.
“I can see the hair follicle you discovered between the paper and the box, and the postmark no doubt revealed he was in the vicinity of the funeral. What of the ash? Will it help us to trace him?”
My friend dropped his lens in deepest disdain, crushed the paper in his fist, and drew a very deep, very slow breath before replying, “Afraid not, my boy.”
“But why not?” I inquired hesitantly.
“Because he was smoking my cigarettes.”
I could think of no reply to this repulsive piece of information and thus attempted none.
“As for the trophies,” Holmes continued more evenly, lifting a glass test tube from its holder and switching on his blue-flamed burner, “he has amassed, so far as we know, a womb and a kidney. And now my cigarette case is certainly in his possession, for how else would he know it was monogrammed?”
“Holmes, what are you doing?”
My friend fixed me with a sly glance as he set a container of water on the burner and drew a vial of snow white crystals out of a small leather case. Reaching for the soiled paper and cutting the dark stain free of the rest, he tossed it into the steaming water. “What do you imagine this stain to be, Watson? Ink? Mud? Dye?”
“I hardly like to think of what it—oh, but Holmes—of course!” I cried, as he drew drops of various liquids from their jars and carefully combined them in a test tube. “How could I forget? At the very moment I met you, you were quite incoherent over your discovery.”
“That is because the Sherlock Holmes test for hemoglobin represented an incalculable breakthrough in criminal science, and may I add it took me nearly four months to perfect,” he returned airily.* He unstopped the vial and shook a few pale crystals into the water in which the dark paper was beginning to break down, switching off the burner as he did so. “It was an historic day, friend Watson, in more ways than one, in celebration of which I invite you to do the honours.”
I took the clear liquid he had prepared and hesitantly tipped a few drops into the water. Before our very eyes, it turned from transparent to a menacing maroon.
“Blood it is,” he said evenly. “I thought as much. Well, share and share alike. I’m off to the Yard. It would be pretty miserly of me to keep this to myself after all Lestrade’s tribulations on our behalf. Do me the favour, my dear fellow, of waiting up for me? It is just remotely possible that I may require a friend to post bail.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN What Stephen Dunlevy Had to Tell
Sherlock Holmes was not detained at the Yard, although he remarked that night that more than one officer of the law had eyed him in barely suppressed suspicion. “The joke of it is,” he mused, “that if I were indeed engaged in any sort of nefarious activity, there’s not a man among them who’d work it out. I am under no delusions regarding my chances of success should I ever shrug off the constraints of civilization, my dear fellow. I fear I would prove entirely unstoppable.”
My notes indicate that the eleventh of October saw the completion of the inquest into the murder of Catherine Eddowes, which I attended in hopes of extracting any relevant medical knowledge which may have come to light. However, apart from assuring the coroner that removing a kidney required at least a rudimentary anatomical education, and that such a kidney could have no value whatever on the open market, little was said about the Ripper’s second “trophy.” The verdict returned, as all the others had been, was that of “willful murder against some person or persons unknown.”
I returned to Baker Street in the evening disheartened by the proceedings and was donning my slippers when I heard the violent ringing of our front door bell. Hastening to the bow window, I drew the curtain and peered down, but our caller had either disappeared or already entered. I had just turned back toward the sitting room door when Miss Monk flew through it and slammed it shut behind her.
“Where is he, then?” she demanded furiously.
“Holmes? I could not say. My dear Miss Monk, whatever is the matter?”
“If he’s played me the crooked cross, he’ll answer for it! He’ll not charm himself out of it either, the slang cove. I’ll do him down, mark my words. I’ll not spy for him and be kept in the dark, not for a pound a week, not for a pound a day, nor yet a pound a minute!”
“Miss Monk, I beg of you, sit down and tell me in plain English what has happened.”
“I am being followed!” she cried.
“Good heavens! Have you any idea by whom?”
