It was when his options had all but run out that he found himself, on the Friday next, back in the East End. Three months earlier a girl’s body had turned up in an alley behind Watney Street, near Whitechapel. The cause of death, as listed in the coroner’s report, was uncertain. The girl’s trachea had been snapped, and yet there was so much bruising around her body that it was impossible to tell whether the neck injury had killed her or whether it was any one of the other dark blue bruises or deep red cuts spread across her pale body that had done her in. She’d been discovered fully clothed. There was no mention, in the documents retained by Scotland Yard, of a wedding dress among the girl’s possessions. They did, however, know her name: Sally Needling. She was a good girl. Her parents had put her up as missing, and when the body had come in, they had taken one look at it and known she was theirs. They lived far away in Hampstead. Twenty-six years old, she was well on her way to being a spinster and still lived at home. They had money. A nice bit of land. Her father was a barrister. The girl was certainly no harlot; moreover, her parents could think of no reason for her to be in Whitechapel at all, as they’d informed the Yard.

Arthur found the alley behind Watney Street. He went about his rounds in the dark and narrow space. A horrible smell seemed to drift outward from deep within. As Arthur walked a few paces into the alley, he realized the cause of the smell: A butcher’s shop, on the other side of the alley, had stored half-carved piglets and cattle husks that had gone bad outside the shop’s back door. Presumably, Arthur hoped, before they could transport the rotting meat elsewhere. While dim, the alley looked out onto a busy thoroughfare. Arthur could hear the rattling carriages from Watney Street as he walked to the most remote part of the alley. It was indisputably a public place, far removed from the closed-door chambers of the boardinghouse where Morgan Nemain had met her end.

This most likely would not be it, Arthur realized. A girl being strangled in the alley would make so much of a racket that it would easily be heard in the street. Whatever atrocity had been committed here, he felt confident that it had little to do with the mystery at hand.

It was at this moment in his thoughts that Arthur looked up. A line of clothes hung from a string going across the alley, connecting a window of the building on the alley’s east side with a hook in the wall on its left. All manner of apparel hung from the line: woolly trousers, bright shirtwaists, leg-o’-mutton jackets, soggy white shirts, stockings of every shape and size imaginable. What an odd assortment!

Arthur exited the alley and looked onto the doorstep of the building to the alley’s east side, from the window of which the clothes hung. There was no sign out in front of the four-story brick home. It appeared to be someone’s private residence. And yet so many garments dried outside.

Arthur knocked on the door. He heard nothing from inside. He knocked again. Finally an old woman answered the door. She had a mean face-squat nose, deep-set eyes, and beside her lips the lines of a permanent frown.

“Well then? What is it?” she barked.

“Pardon me, ma’am,” said Arthur. “Is this your home?”

“No, sir, the queen lives here. She’s inside at the moment, tending to the char.”

Arthur was unimpressed by the woman’s sarcasm.

“I’m in need of a place to rest my head for the night,” he replied. “Might you be able to provide me with room and board for a reasonable fee?”

The woman looked up and down the block, as if searching for someone amid the midday traffic.

“What have you heard?” she asked.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who told you to come here for a bed?”

“No one. I was passing by, and your lovely home appeared so hospitable.”

The woman examined Arthur, then sniffed her nose in the air. “From time to time, I rent my rooms out to strangers,” she said. “If they look like a responsible sort. You seem halfway decent, I suppose.”

The woman turned and led Arthur inside.

“How many rooms do you have here?” he asked.

“I might have a spare one for you, if you behave yourself, and I suggest that’s the only room you need concern yourself with.” Arthur recognized that the woman’s behavior was quite odd, but he said nothing. He was making progress.

She led him through her kitchen into a long hallway. The house seemed quiet, or at least far quieter than Arthur’s previous boardinghouse experience. Various rooms flanked the hallway, and Arthur could make out two bedchambers and an indoor water closet through the half-open doors as he passed by. At the end of the hall lay what looked to be the master bedroom. Its doors were swung wide open, and Arthur could see the late-morning light pouring in from outside. As they approached the room, the woman turned left, ascending the first few steps of a long, narrow staircase as she spoke.

“Your room will be upstairs. The ones downstairs are full.” As Arthur came to the bottom of the stairs, he glanced to his right, into the bright bedroom. The wide bed was neatly made with white sheets and a blue blanket. An oil lamp rested on the woman’s nightstand. And on the far side of the room, a small closet was open-in fact, it was without doors at all, and a pair of useless hinges hung from the wall. As his head turned back toward the staircase, he could just make out the contents of the closet: the dark clothes of a woman who cleaned a large household, the torn dresses, the drab bustles, and one bright white wedding gown.

Arthur stopped at the foot of the steps. He looked back toward the open closet: What in the world was this mean Whitechapel charwoman doing with a dress like that? Arthur planted his feet, refusing to ascend the stairs after the woman.

“Where did you get that?” he asked quietly.

The woman turned. She appeared confused. “Get what, now?”

“You have a sparkling white wedding gown in what I presume is your bedchamber. Forgive my impoliteness, but it is considerably too small for you to wear. Whose is it?”

Suspicion flashed across the woman’s face.

“And what’s it to you?” she asked, with a note of anger in her voice. Arthur decided that in this instance the truth might serve his case better than a fresh lie.

“My name is Arthur Conan Doyle. I am investigating the murder of Morgan Nemain, and as of this moment I am also investigating the murder of one Sally Needling.”

“And what’s that to do with me?”

“Sally Needling stayed here on the night that she died, didn’t she? She was one of your tenants.”

The woman matched Arthur’s deep stare as the seconds ticked by. Neither blinked. The woman’s brow became cross as she emitted a low snarl.

“Get out, you rotting pego!”

“How did her corpse get from your boardinghouse to the alley behind? I don’t believe you killed her-a man did. But you were here when it happened.”

“I don’t care who you are or what business you’re on. The door is thataway. Make use of it.”

Arthur was in need of some means to compel this woman to talk. He thought of her strangeness at the door. She had treated her boardinghouse as if it were clandestine. As if she did not want anyone to know what she did in this house.

“You’ve been keeping lodgers here against the wishes of someone nearby, haven’t you? Someone who frequents this very block, I’d wager. Hmmm, now…” Arthur broke eye contact, rubbing his palms together and humming as he pieced together the most likely possibilities.

This woman did not appear to share his regard for the cause of justice. He would have to be more firm.

“Quite a large place, isn’t this?” he said. “For a woman such as yourself to possess? You’ve no ring on your finger… You don’t own this house, do you? You’re looking after it for someone else and renting out rooms on the side for an extra few shillings a week. But your little business would be shut down if the house’s owner became aware of what you’re doing, would it not? I would hate, of course, to be the one to have to tell him.”