The events leading to her murder are well documented and considered reliable unless one is inclined to feel, as I do, that the recollections of a hard-drinking prostitute named Pearly Poll might lack a certain clarity and veracity. If she didn’t outright lie when she was interviewed by the police and later when she testified at the coroner’s inquest on August 23rd, she was probably confused and suffering from alcohol-induced amnesia. Pearly Poll was frightened. She told police she was so upset that she might just drown herself in the Thames.
During the inquest, Pearly Poll was reminded several times that she was under oath as she testified that on August 6th, at 10:00 P.M., she and Martha Tabran began drinking with two soldiers in Whitechapel. The couples went their separate ways at 11:45. Pearly Poll told the coroner and jurors that she went up Angel Court with the “corporal,” while Martha headed toward George Yard with the “private,” and that both soldiers wore white bands around their caps. The last time Pearly Poll saw Martha and the private, they were walking toward the dilapidated tenement housing of George Yard Buildings on Commercial Street, in the dark heart of East End slums. Pearly Poll claimed nothing out of the ordinary happened while she had been with Martha that night. Their encounter with the soldiers had been pleasant enough. There had been no fighting or arguments, nothing at all that might have set off even the faintest alarm in either Pearly Poll or Martha, who certainly had seen it all and had survived the streets a long time for good reason.
Pearly Poll claimed to know nothing about what happened to Martha after 11:45 P.M., nor is there any record of what Pearly Poll herself was up to after she slipped away with her corporal for “immoral purposes.”
When she learned that Martha had been murdered, Pearly Poll might have had cause to worry about her own welfare and to think twice about giving too much information to the coppers. She wouldn’t put it past those boys in blue to listen to her story and then send her to prison as “a scapegoat for five thousand of her class.” Pearly Poll was to stick to her story: She had ended up in Angel Court, a good mile’s walk from where she left Martha, and inside the City of London. The City was not under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police.
For a wily, street-smart prostitute to place herself outside the legal reach of the Metropolitan Police was to encourage the constables and investigators to avoid turning the case into a complicated, competitive multijurisdictional investigation. The City of London – better known as “the Square Mile” – is an ornery oddity that can be traced back to 1 A.D. when the Romans founded the city on the banks of the Thames. The City remains a city unto itself with its own municipal services and government, including its own police force, which today serves a resident population of 6,000 – a number that swells to more than a quarter of a million during business hours.
Historically, the City has never been interested in the concerns of the greater London area unless one of its problems somehow impacts the City’s autonomy or quality of life. The City has always been a stubborn, wealthy oasis in the midst of a spreading metropolis, and when people refer to London, they usually mean the Great Metropolis. The existence of the City remains unknown to many a tourist. I don’t know if Pearly Poll really took her client into the deserted city to avoid the Metropolitan Police or for any other reason. She might not have gone near the City, but instead conducted her business quickly, collected her meager fee, and went off to the nearest public house or returned to Dorset Street to find a bed.
Two hours and fifteen minutes after Pearly Poll said she saw Martha last, Police Constable 226 Barrett of Metropolitan Police Division H was on routine patrol on Wentworth Street, which intersected with Commercial Street and ran along the north side of George Yard Buildings. At 2:00 A.M., Barrett noticed a soldier out alone. He appeared to belong to one of the regiments of footguards who wore white bands around their caps. Barrett estimated that the soldier, a private, was between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, and five foot nine or ten. The young man in his neat uniform had a fair complexion and a small, dark-brown mustache turned up at the ends, and wore no medals on his uniform except a good-conduct badge. The soldier told Constable Barrett that he was “waiting for a chum who had gone with a girl.”