The Fiend of Fleet Street is the fourth Dreadful Crimes case: Detective Murphy vanished while looking into a string of disappearances around Fleet Street. You follow his last movements through a bakery, a butcher's, a barber's, a flower shop and a leather shop.
Part 4 of 10 in The Dreadful Crimes
Mrs Moffat sold Murphy a pie and gets cheap meat delivered by a carter named George. The butcher John Tines complains that someone is undercutting him. A sack of manure from the florist contains bone fragments, one looking like a human knuckle. A pale leather bag carries a faded green cross, and a woman's jacket is punched with diamond-shaped holes. George's ledger lists his drop-offs, and his diary shows he was growing suspicious of his cargo.
Tobias Jeffers, Feeney Sodd, John Tines, Mrs Moffat, George, Stephen Bean and Joanna.
The leatherworker Tobias Jeffers was killing local people and splitting their remains between the tannery, the florist's manure and the pie shop, all carried by George, who never knew. George, who had grown suspicious, turns up dead with a diamond-shaped puncture that matches the holes Jeffers's awls make.
Mrs Moffat says Murphy bought a pie, chatted for a while and then headed for the barber. Feeney Sodd remembers trimming his hair and spotting the tattoo, and blames the blood on his floor on a shaky hand from trying to give up drink. Joanna at the flower shop hopes her sweetheart George will propose that very day, and her employer mentions George keeps bringing her gifts, a jacket and a handbag among them.
A Simple Matter of Murder!
A Simple Matter of Murder! is the first Dreadful Crimes case: a foreman lies stabbed in a Whitechapel warehouse and a boy is found holding the bloody knife. Henry Raymond and young Artie introduce themselves and challenge you to solve it, and the obvious answer turns out to be wrong.
Death Stalks the Colonel
Death Stalks the Colonel is the third Dreadful Crimes case: Louis Prescott, a former army colonel who runs a munitions factory in Southwark, has been shot through the heart at noon. Several shots were fired at that moment, and you have to work out which bullet killed him.
Locked in... to Die!
Locked in... to Die! is the sixth Dreadful Crimes case: the music critic Byron Cashan is found dead in a room locked from the inside, in a lodging house in the Strand. You check each tenant's room and the basement to work out how the killer reached him.
Murder at the Palace!
Murder at the Palace! is the final Dreadful Crimes case: Frederick Abberline calls you to Buckingham Palace, where a guard lies dead in Queen Victoria's study on the day of a knighting ceremony. The case pulls in clues from every earlier crime and ends with a rooftop standoff.