Death at Whitechapel (28 page)

The door opened, and a young girl of twelve or thirteen burst in, carrying a bunch of violets. She was a pretty thing in a white shirtwaist, blue skirt, and white stockings, with long, dark hair and delicate features in a heart-shaped face.

“Hello, Walter,” she said. She spoke loudly, and with an odd rhythm. “I'm not intruding, am I? Should I go away again?”

“No, don't go, Alice,” Walter said, also loudly. He motioned to her to come and stand beside him and slipped his arm around her waist. “Lord Charles, I should like you to meet Miss Alice Crook.”

Charles stood and took the girl's hand. “Miss Crook,” he said gravely. “I am very pleased to meet you.”

“You'll have to speak up,” Walter said. “She's deaf, you know.” He smiled slightly. “Like her father.”

 

 

C
harles caught a cab at the corner of Hampstead Road and Euston. He directed the driver to Paddington Station, where he went into the telegraphic office and spent some time carefully composing a telegram to Frederick Abberline, in Bournemouth. That done, he turned up his collar and trudged down Baker Street in the direction of Mayfair and Sibley House. It was late afternoon now, well past teatime, and the day had turned cold. There was a bite in the damp gray air, the presage of winter weather, and the mist blowing up from the river was like needles against his face. He might have caught another cab and saved himself a chill, but he wanted to clear his mind before he arrived at Sibley House and it was time to relate Walter Sickert's incredible story to Kate—and to Jennie.

It had been a strange and eventful day, a day that had dispelled, at least in Charles's mind, much of the mystery that surrounded the most atrocious crimes London had ever known. There were still a great many details he did not know now and perhaps would never know, but the basic outlines seemed clear, even simple. If all that he and Kate had learned were true, the Ripper killings were the result of a unfortunate marriage obliterated by the royal family and a blackmail attempt by a one-time nursemaid and her friends, whose murders had been clothed in a mad Masonic ritual.

But as he trudged along through the gathering twilight, Charles felt no triumph over the secrets that he and Kate had uncovered in the basements and lofts of Cleveland Street or the dirty alleys of the East End. What was to be gained from any of this knowledge? Eddy was either dead or permanently out of reach—and certainly out of the succession, his misdeeds having condemned him to a life of exile and imprisonment. Annie was disabled, her mind destroyed, a wanderer among the outcasts of the City. The men who had done the killing, Sir William Gull and Lord Randolph Churchill, were both dead—Gull (if Lees' story was accurate) having died in a lunatic asylum, Churchill of syphilis, also a maniac, at the end. Only the coachman survived, apparently: questioned, he might be able to fill in some of the missing details, but what of that? Alice's birth record could be found, Lees' story could be checked, the Masonic affiliations could be confirmed—but to what end? There was nothing left to know about the Ripper killings that mattered to anyone, anywhere, except as a matter of forensic curiosity, or to serve some abstract ideal of justice.

Justice! The thought of it set his teeth on edge. There had been no justice anywhere in the whole of this foul business, only fear, and exploitation, and high-level corruption. How high did it reach? To the Prime Minister, certainly, and the Prince. To the Queen? Very likely—the old lady was notorious for her demands to be told each minute detail of government, and neither her son nor the Prime Minister would have dared to keep Eddy's marriage and Mary Kelly's blackmail letter from her. And Sickert was only speculating when he said that the Royals had not sanctioned murder. Charles knew from personal experience how the Prince's instructions were given, with a wink and a nod. And even if the directive had not come from HRH or Salisbury, they could not have escaped the knowledge of the women's deaths. The papers had shrieked the gruesome news—the police reports, the inquest reports, the interrogation of suspects—from the end of August to early November. The Royals might have called off their dogs at any time after the first murder, and they didn't.

Oblivious to the traffic, Charles crossed Oxford Street, splashed to the thigh with gutter filth by a passing brewer's wagon and nearly run down by a motor lorry, whose driver flung curses at him like stones. The fog wrapped around him like a cold, wet shroud, and in spite of the hurrying crowds that brushed past, he felt desperately alone. Yes, he had found it all out, but to what purpose? The knowledge could serve no one, bind no wounds, heal no broken hearts. No justice was possible, no public resolution, no restitution.

But with this thought came another. What about the children? There was Alice, the Little Princess—except that she wasn't a princess, for her mother was a Catholic commoner and her father no longer a prince. She was only a pretty child with a delicate face and something of her grandmother's look, saved from the gutter by the generosity of her father's friend, not very stable himself, who had taken the responsibility for seeing that she had some sort of decent life. No revelation of her parentage, of her connection to the Ripper killings, could ever change her circumstances or bring anything but unhappiness to her.

And there was Winston. It had been his mother's desperate efforts to silence Finch that had opened up this whole affair. If any word of Randolph's involvement in the heinous murders were to reach the public in her son's lifetime, Winston's political ambitions should be ruined, his life wrecked. As far as Winston—and his brother Jack, too—were concerned, the sooner the Ripper was forgotten, the deeper the secret was buried, the safer their futures. They had nothing to do with the sins of their father. Justice could only destroy them, as surely as it would destroy Alice.

Charles thrust his hands deeper in his pockets and ducked his head into the wind, the air flowing like cold water inside his collar and down his back, the clopping carriages and darting hansoms moving past in the deepening twilight, the gas streetlights, newly lit, emerging like haloed beacons in the gloom. Five minutes later, he had reached Sibley House, and Richards was opening the door and clucking over the wetness of his coat and shoes, and Kate was standing at the library door, her russet hair shining in the light, her hand held out in loving welcome.

“You're wet and cold,” she said. “Come in by the fire, my dear.”

He did not answer. Instead, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her mouth, then folded her into his arms, warming himself in her warmth, cleansing himself in her fresh, clean scent. It would not be easy to relate to Lady Randolph Churchill the horrors he had heard today, but Kate would be there, and by her very presence would help him to say what needed to be said, only that much and no more. He touched her forehead with his lips, tenderly, thankfully. Kate would always be there, and for that, he was unutterably grateful.

 

F
red Abberline read the enigmatic telegram one more time. He folded the flimsy yellow paper, pushed it into the pocket of the woolen shirt he wore under his mackintosh, and stared out to sea, where the gray of the sky and the gray of the water met with no perceptible boundary. He had come down to the pier, as he often did these days, to be alone, to think, and to remember—remember things he desperately wished he had never learned and fervently hoped he might someday forget.

But that was a fool's dream, he thought wearily. What he had discovered would be with him to the day he died, an albatross chained around his neck, a leaden weight on his heart. Worse yet, it was a burden he could not lighten by speaking of it, except to Sickert, who already knew the worst of the horror. He could not speak of it to Sheridan, before whose integrity he felt compromised and dirty; nor to his wife, Emma, whose only joy in life was the house he had bought her with the coin of his complicity. He could not tell the world that he knew who committed the crimes that had riveted the attention of the entire Empire, the murders that had appeared to baffle even Scotland Yard. He could not tell, because his knowledge was now a state secret, and to reveal it was not merely madness, but treason.

Abberline had joined the Metropolitan Police as an idealistic and naive young lad of nineteen and had risen swiftly through the ranks: to Sergeant in two years and Inspector in ten. He had been a good policeman; more, he had been an honest policeman. This had been a rare and a hard thing, especially after he was assigned to the Whitechapel C.I.D. The division was rotten to its core. Payoffs were routinely accepted as part of the policeman's salary, and corruption was a part of the policeman's world—but not for him. He had risen above the rot even in that God-forsaken part of London, and through the strength of his moral character and reputation he had succeeded in the nearly impossible job of keeping his hands clean for over twenty years.

But a decade ago, he had been pulled, willy-nilly, into a succession of terrible events. He had been captured in their inexorable grip just as he himself had captured hundreds of criminals and delivered them into the swift embrace of justice. Except that it was not justice that had seized him, but the rot. Struggle as he might to keep himself clean—and he
had
struggled, hadn't he?—it had at last gathered him into its filthy embrace and pulled him down.

In the spring of '88, Abberline was transferred from Whitechapel to the West End and instructed to keep an eye on the young Prince Albert Victor, called Eddy, who seemed to be hell-bent on getting himself into as much trouble as possible. Eddy believed him to be a bodyguard, but Abberline was in actuality a spy, paid above his ordinary salary to report directly to Francis Knollys, private secretary to the Prince of Wales. He was to tell Knollys where Eddy went and with whom, and was also directed to be on the lookout for prostitutes who might attempt to approach the young prince. Eddy was to be kept from women, at all costs.

The surveillance duty was not difficult and Emma had happily welcomed the extra money it brought, but it wasn't long before Abberline felt uncomfortable with the work. Eddy was rumored to be incapable of learning, but Abberline found him sweet and simple, and suspected that it was the young man's deafness which made him appear backward. In fact, Abberline saw, the prince's deafness was so severe that it opened him to influence and possible corruption, an easy mark for men who did not have his best interests at heart. Abberline felt increasingly protective toward the prince, who seemed to be driven by some sort of inward despair and anger, and even though he felt himself a Judas each time he made his report to Knollys and collected his additional wage, he comforted himself with the thought that he was doing Eddy a good service by looking out for him.

The duty continued less than six months, however. Knollys abruptly terminated his employment around the middle of August, and Abberline was sent back to Whitechapel. The first of the murders occurred at the end of August, and he was given responsibility for the investigation, to which dozens of detectives were assigned. In the beginning, he had been glad to get back to the routine of police work and the company of his colleagues, and began to systematically pursue the leads his detectives turned up. But then the second murder occurred and he began to sense that something was wrong, that the rot was rising around him. The third and fourth murders, on September 30, convinced him that the ritual mutilations were a kind of secret code and that the vocabulary of the code was Masonic, some of the details of which he had encountered in a book called
Freemasonry Exposed,
written by an American Freemason who had been murdered for his revelations.

Knowing that Freemasons were involved in the murders had not taken him any closer to the actual perpetrators, however. For one thing, he could not imagine a motive. He discovered that Nichols and Chapman and Stride were acquainted, but that didn't mean a great deal—the three women had lived close to one another and frequented the same taverns. But when Mary Kelly was murdered and he began to trace various leads into her past life, a clearer picture began to emerge. As a skilled and experienced investigator, he found out a great deal about Mary Kelly within a few days of her death. He learned that she had once worked for a confectioner in Cleveland Street, then was hired as a nursemaid for a woman named Annie Crook, who had been married in the chapel of Saint Saviours to (it was said) some member of the royal family, a close friend of the painter Walter Sickert. He learned also that Annie Crook had been kidnapped and mistreated, and that Kelly had returned to the East End and gone to drinking and, with three of the other dead women, had resorted to blackmail.

Yes, the details had come quickly, and when he put them all together, he realized, with mounting horror, that Annie Crook had been married to Prince Eddy and had borne him a daughter, that the women had been killed to silence their tongues, and that the killers were Freemasons, although at that point he could not name the murderers themselves.

But it wouldn't have done him any good to name them, if he could. By the time he had understood the Masonic implications and pieced the rest of the details together, he knew that the rot had swallowed the entire case, and Scotland Yard and Whitehall with it. For his two superior officers, Robert Anderson and Sir Charles Warren, Assistant Commissioner and Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police respectively, were both high-ranking Freemasons and obviously committed to a cover-up. He could point to a half-dozen instances of their mismanagement and interference with the case—not the least of which was Anderson's leaving for an extended holiday in Switzerland the day after Chapman's death; Warren's order to the divisional police surgeon to suppress the details of the mutilations; and Warren's otherwise incomprehensible erasure of the Ripper's chalked message. To top it off, Warren himself resigned as commissioner just hours before Kelly's death, and his failure to notify Abberline of his departure had led to enormous confusion and delay at the crime scene, and the potential loss of evidence. The Home Office followed by illegally removing the inquest from Whitechapel to Shoreditch Town Hall, placing it under the direction of a coroner who aggressively suppressed important evidence. The next day, Abberline was told to turn in his notes and close his investigation. But these events came as no surprise. He had known since Chapman was killed that the fix was on.