kind. What can interest you in their miserable deaths?'
'It is an extraordinary case, Watson,' Holmes cried. 'I have been studying it. I knew the police would need my help. Shall I tell you the facts?'
'Please do!' I said. Was this going to be one of Sherlock Holmes's great cases? I hoped that at last he had found something to interest him.
'The women who died were poor, and neither young nor beautiful,' he told me. 'So they were not killed for money or for love. Why were they killed? That is one mystery. There is another. Each woman was killed with a knife. The word "killed", Watson, cannot describe the violent and terrible ways in which they were murdered. They were cut up like meat. The stomach of one was opened, the head of another almost cut from her body. But this is not the worst. There are things that even the newspapers will not describe.'
He showed me a doctor's report on one of the bodies. As I read it, a sick feeling carne over me.
'What man could do this?' I asked. 'What possible reason could he have to do this to a woman? Why, Holmes, why?' He smiled coolly at me.
'Why indeed? That is the real interest of this case