With that object, I obtained permission of the police next morning, and viewed the body which was in the mortuary awaiting identification. It lay in the chilly chamber, stretched upon the dark slate slab, the face covered with a white cloth. This the constable removed, revealing the features of a dark, rather handsome, young woman, evidently of the poorer class, and a denizen of that quarter of the city.
As I gazed upon the body I wondered who she was. What was she? What was her history? Could even such a plebeian woman be missed by her friends, and no inquiries made after her? It seemed almost incredible, yet it was so; for when the coroner held his inquiry a few days later, she had not been identified, so the verdict of “Murder” was given, photographs were taken of the dead unknown—one of which I have before me as I write—and she was conveyed to her last resting-place in Nunhead Cemetery.
It was no isolated case. Every year numbers of bodies of men and women are found by the London police and buried unclaimed, at the expense of the parish; until one is at a loss to know where are the relatives of the unfortunate ones that they make no sign, and take no trouble to make known their loss.
It is one of Babylon’s unfathomable mysteries.
For days—nay, weeks—afterwards, I continually devoured the information contained in the newspapers regarding the eighth murder, but the victim remained unidentified; and although I frequented the busiest haunts of men in the City and its immediate suburbs at all hours of the day and night, in the hope of meeting the murderer, my efforts were so dispiritingly futile that more than once I was sorely tempted to give up in despair.
Chapter Sixteen.
Facing the Inevitable.
Though I had been in London nearly two months I had heard nothing of Vera, and her explanation of my imprisonment, as promised by the Cossack, had not been made.