“I am very glad you both have come,” George Lusk declared, shaking our hands firmly. His lively brow was clouded with anxiety and the downward sweep of his moustache emphasized his unease. “The thing is a repulsive hoax, of course; I have no doubt it is merely a boon for those vultures of the popular press, but I thought it best to call you in.” He gestured to the rolltop desk.
Holmes reached it in an instant and lifted the slats. A strong smell, which I realized had faintly infused the room all along, permeated the atmosphere. I recognized it at once as spirits of wine, which was everywhere employed as a medical preservative and which I had often used myself during my years at university.
My friend seated himself at the desk, surveying a small box of plain cardboard, resting on the brown paper in which it had arrived. Mr. Lusk and I crowded round either shoulder to witness him open the receptacle. Inside sat a mound of glistening flesh.
“Well, Doctor?” said Holmes, glancing up at me. He pulled a pocketknife from his frock coat, opened it, and passed it to me along with the sinister box. I probed the object carefully.
“It is a portion of a kidney.”
“Nearly half, I would say from the angle of the cut and the arc of this side. Human?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Gender? Age?”
“I could not tell you. If it is half, as you say, then the kidney is adult, but beyond that, further identification is impossible.”
“It does not appear to be injected with the formalin* used for dissection organs. Tissue preserved only in spirits of wine would inevitably deteriorate without a fixative and grow quickly useless in the classroom, so we can rule out a prank by an undergraduate. However, the ethyl alcohol it has been resting in is easily obtained.”
“This letter accompanied the organ,” Mr. Lusk indicated.
My friend first inspected the container itself, followed by the paper wrapping, before reaching for the document which explained, in the most vile terms and debased calligraphy I had ever laid eyes on, the contents of that horrid box.
“Black ink, cheapest foolscap, no finger marks or other traces,” Holmes said softly. “‘From hell,’ indeed! What sort of frenzied imagination could be capable of constructing such trash?”
“It is a hoax, surely,” Mr. Lusk insisted. “Everyone knows Catherine Eddowes’s kidney was taken, after all, Mr. Holmes. It is the organ of a dog. Oh, I do beg your pardon, Dr. Watson—if human, as you say, perhaps it is a prank enacted by a roguish medical examiner.”
“It is possible,” said Holmes. “I do not think it likely. Look at this script: I detect key similarities to other samples from our quarry, but what a state he was in to pen this dark epistle! I have made a special study of handwriting, or graphology,* as it is now called by the French, but I have never seen anything so debauched as this specimen.”
“The script alone leads you to think this her kidney?”
“This scrap of flesh came from no school or university, and neither did it come from the nearby London Hospital.”
“How can you be sure?”
“When necessary, they preserve organic materials in glycerine.”
“Well, then, but it need not have come from the East-end. Surely in the West-end, many establishments —”
“The postmark, if one regards it with a lens, reveals the barest smudge of a ‘London E.’ It originated in Whitechapel.”
“Still, any mortuary could have supplied the thing.”
“Whitechapel possesses no mortuary!” Holmes snapped, his patience failing him. “It possesses a shed.”
Mr. Lusk’s features were suffused with complete astonishment. “But the crime rate in Whitechapel! The sickness, the disease…Only half the children ever grow up, Mr. Holmes. No district has greater need of a mortuary!”
“Nevertheless.”
“God in heaven, if the world knew the troubles of this district…” Mr. Lusk calmed himself through a visible effort of will and regarded us with a touching sadness.
“Watson, we have work ahead of us,” the detective declared shortly. “Mr. Lusk, may I entrust to you the task of reporting this matter to the Yard?”
“Of course, Mr. Holmes. Oh, and please do give my regards to Miss Monk!” Mr. Lusk exclaimed as we turned to leave. “I fear she may have been tormented to some degree by my offspring, but I trust she came to no lasting harm.”
Holmes was already halfway down the street before I reached him, the length of his stride more than making up for any residual weakness of constitution. Knowing him as I did, I had not expected him to proffer a single word, but to my surprise, speech fairly exploded from his gaunt frame.
“I will not be toyed with in this manner! As if we’d not already suffered intolerable lows, the sending of a preserved organ through the London Royal Mail quite strikes the final quivering nail into the coffin of this investigation.”
“My dear fellow, whatever can you mean?”
“Here we are furnished with clue after clue, missive after blood-soaked missive, and the villain has no further revealed his identity than he did when he plunged a knife in my chest,” he spat out in disgust. “Apart, of course, from its being a six-inch double-bladed dissection knife.”
“Holmes,” I protested, alarmed, “you have done all that could be expected of—”
“Of Gregson, or of Lestrade, or any of the other farcical simpletons who joined the Yard because they weren’t strong enough for hard labour or rich enough to buy a decent army commission.”
Shocked at his vehemence, I could only manage, “Surely we have made progress.”
“We are surrounded by quicksand! No footmarks, no signal traits, no traceable characteristics, merely the assurance he is enjoying his purloined organs and my cigarettes!”
“Holmes, where are we going?”
“To settle a debt,” he snarled, and not one word more did he say for the twenty minutes it took us to walk from Mile End to the throbbing artery of Whitechapel Road and then down a series of streets to a green door in a begrimed brick wall. Holmes rapped brusquely and then fell to tapping the head of his stick against his high forehead.
“Who resides here, Holmes?”
“Stephen Dunlevy.”
“Does he indeed? You have been here before?”
His answering glare was so exquisitely pained that I resolved to postpone further queries for better days.
A slatternly creature of advancing years in a meticulously preened bonnet opened the door and regarded us with the primness of the long-ruined. “How may I help you gentlemen?”
“We are here to see your lodger, Mr. Stephen Dunlevy.”
“And who are you, sir?”
“We are friends.”
“Now, this is a private establishment, gents. I can’t just allow any man from the street to harass my lodgers, if you understand me, sir.”
“Perfectly. In that case, we are here to bring charges against you for brothel keeping under Section Thirteen of the Criminal Law Amendment Act. That is, of course, unless you manage to remember we are friends of Mr.
