'I am going to Whitechapel,' he told me. 'As you know, I have rooms in several parts of London. For the next three days I shall live among the poor people of White chapel. Nobody will know who I am. I shall talk to them and listen to everything that they tell me.'
'May I come with you?' I asked, but he said, 'No, Watson, you may not. If there is a murder, I shall send for you. I shall need your help, old fellow, have no fear of that!'
I spent a lonely evening in Baker Street. I was asleep when, at half past two in the morning, a cab arrived to take me to Whitechapel. Another woman had met a violent death.
As I travelled through the dark, empty streets, London seemed a strange and ghostly place - it lay there like the body of a great animal, not sleeping but dead.
The driver took me east, towards the poorest parts of the city.
He stopped in a narrow lane off Leadenhall Street. I saw a group of policemen standing under a light, and went up to them. Holmes was not there, but I was introduced to the police doctor. He offered to show me the body.
'I know you are a doctor,' he said, 'but I must warn you. You have never seen anything like this before.'
He led me to a dark corner, where something lay covered on the ground. He held up a light for me to see and pulled back the cover.
No words can describe the awfulness of what I saw then, For a moment my head felt light, I began to shake and was afraid I would fall. The thing on the ground had been a woman, but it was not a woman now. It was no more than blood and meat, cut open and ripped up with a terrible, unnatural violence. I knew now why the killer called himself Jack the Ripper.
The doctor covered the body, and I walked back to the group of policemen.
'Have you seen Mr Holmes?' I asked one of them,
'Oh yes, sir,' he said. 'He was here with Inspector Lestrade.
They carne straight from the other murder.'
'The other murder!' I cried. 'Has there been more than one murder tonight?' 'Why yes, sir. Did you not know?'
At that moment I heard the sounds of a horse corning into the lane, and a cab appeared.
'Get in, Watson!' a voice shouted, and Holmes helped me into the cab.
'He has escaped,' he told me. 'We followed him, but we have lost him.' His face was sad and tired. 'I want to show you something interesting. Then we can go home.'
The cab took us to a dark and dirty yard. 'The first woman died here,' Holmes said.
A policeman was standing in the yard. Holmes took a light from him and shone it on the wall.
'Look at this, Watson,' he said.
These words were written on the wall:
No Time To Rip
'It is the murderer's hand-writing,' Holmes said. 'The same as in the letter that Lestrade showed us.'
'What is happening?' I cried. 'I cannot understand what this killer wants.'
'He wants everybody to be afraid of him,' Holmes told me. 'He wants to be the most evil killer in the world. He had to kill two women tonight, because he did not have time to cut and rip the body of the first. I think he heard somebody corning, and he had to leave the body and run. Then he killed a second time, and cut that woman's body to pieces in the way we have seen.'
We were both silent as the cab took us back to Baker Street, far from the narrow, dirty streets of east London.
I could not sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the body of a woman lying in a dark corner, covered in blood.