Dust and Shadow

“It really all began with Stephen Dunlevy here. Not long after Miss Monk consented to serve as our contact in Whitechapel, she met Mr. Dunlevy, who confessed to her that he was the soldier who had awaited his friend’s return on the night of Tabram’s murder. Because the circumstances cast a great deal of suspicion upon this other guardsman, and no less owing to my own doubts regarding Mr. Dunlevy’s chosen career, his story arrested my immediate interest, especially as other women began meeting equally inexplicable and violent ends. I endeavoured to learn more by venturing myself into Whitechapel, which is why Dr. Watson and I happened, through purest coincidence, to catch the Ripper at his foul work. A deduction based on the pony’s behaviour led me into Dutfield’s Yard; the Ripper escaped, as you know, to kill again after he failed in his attempt to dispatch me.

“After this fifth murder, it became obvious to me that we were dealing with no ordinary criminal. He was not a raving lunatic, for if he were, who would ever agree to accompany him with so many unfortunates already dead? Neither was he a thief, nor did he seek calculated revenge, for try as I might to link the poor souls, his victims followed no pattern other than that they were all, as I have said, unfortunates. Thankfully, because I have records of two or three earlier cases matching these particulars—bizarrely motiveless slaughter of anonymous victims—I was able to conclude that the man calling himself Jack the Ripper is a severely diseased monomaniac whose habitual demeanour remains nonetheless perfectly genial.”

“That’s the most atrocious notion I’ve ever heard,” Lestrade muttered, but Holmes took no notice.

“My mention of the name Jack the Ripper brings me to the letters. When he described in exact detail my own cigarette case, and Mr. Lusk received half a human kidney, I had final proof that the man who had murdered five women was writing these letters to bait us. I have no doubt that another note sent to Dr. Watson purporting to be from me was also the Ripper’s work. At first these letters helped us in no way. But finally, I discovered a curious series of numbers which had made an impression on the page beneath. These proved far from negotiable without any context, and so I filed them at the back of my mind until such time as their meaning could be determined.

“After I ascertained his true vocation, Mr. Dunlevy confessed that, while he may have been dressed as a private on the night of Bank Holiday, he was in actuality a journalist whose candid stories were often aided by disguise. He informed me that he had observed Joh

“I had the strongest intuition that this terrible series of murders had begun the night of Martha Tabram’s death, and thus locating the elusive Joh

“Dangerous enough,” Miss Monk put in darkly.

“Then another, rather oblique clue fell into my lap. Matthew Packer had heard Elizabeth Stride remark that the man she was with, the man who all evidence suggests was her killer, was not clad in his habitual attire. Now, the notion that Blackstone considered himself in a sort of negative disguise when he was not in uniform was a very attractive one. Most people identify casual acquaintances through dress and bearing as much as their faces, and if Blackstone could shed his uniform, changing one or two other significant details about his person, he would be well on his way to traveling invisibly through his neighbourhood.”

Holmes’s eyes darted to the charred remains of Tavistock’s latest attack in our fireplace. “By this time, the now notorious Mr. Leslie Tavistock had begun his deeply disquieting press campaign. While I worried that his information was far too close to the mark, much of his accuracy could be blamed upon Mr. Dunlevy here sharing what he knew of my movements to friends within the London press. I had very nearly convinced myself that any other hypothesis would be irrational when, as a result of an expedition masterminded by my associates, Dr. Watson informed me that not only did Tavistock’s source possess information about me that no one but my allies could know without tailing me (and I observed no such person), but that he also had access to my handwriting, and that he and the letter writer, and by extrapolation the Ripper, were one and the same person.”

“Dear God,” Stephen Dunlevy exclaimed softly. “So the same individual who proclaims himself down on whores has endeavoured to lay the blame for his crimes at your doorstep.”

“You see that it is small wonder such an outlandish theory did not attract me before,” Holmes stated grimly. “However, in retrospect, it was damnably clever of this fiend to ferret out an unscrupulous journalist, dangle the temptation of a career-making scandal before him, and thus so oppress my movements that I have at times been in danger of my very life.

“Soon after I made the co

“Then surely he was the culprit, and our troubles are over!” cried Lestrade. “If I were capable of such acts, I should lose no time in ending my life.”

“Therein lies an inherent logical fallacy, my good Lestrade,” Holmes said kindly. “You are not capable of committing such acts. Neither, in fact, was Joh

“But monomania is a very poorly understood malady; there is no reason for us to assume he remembers aught of his disgusting actions.”

“At first, I thought as you do,” my friend continued, packing more shag tobacco into his pipe. “But it is the maximal error, the unpardonable sin, if you will, to twist facts to suit theories rather than twisting theories to suit facts. I asked myself what it would mean if Blackstone’s letter were entirely true. The moment I did so, everything was as clear to me as if I had seen it with my own eyes.

“Consider the accounts. Blackstone states that some few minutes after he entered the alley with Tabram, he stabbed her with his bayonet—a fact corroborated by the coroner—and then, hearing footsteps approach, he ran. Mr. Dunlevy told me he stepped back into the bar for a few minutes, and Constable Be