Pentecost Alley (33 page)

Ewart frowned, his mouth tight, eyes black.

“They’d never get him off,” he said slowly. “He’s guilty as the devil. It’s all perfectly plain. She cheated him and he found out. He went to her to have it out, she wasn’t giving in, maybe told him to take himself off. They quarreled and he lost his temper. Sadistic little swine. But then what kind of man lives off the prostitution of women anyway?”

Lennox let out a little grunt, sad and savage. His shoulders were hunched hard, as if all his body muscles were locked. There was utter loathing in every part of his face in the half the sun caught. The other half was almost invisible.

Pitt guessed what he felt. He was the one who had examined Ada’s body, touched her, seen precisely what had been done to her. He must have imagined her alive, perhaps he even knew what pain she had experienced with the wrenched and dislocated joints, the broken bones, the terror as she struggled for breath. His own pity for Costigan drained away as he watched the younger man’s emotions raw in his face.

Pitt sighed. “What I’m really thinking of is that FitzJames knows who it was who tried to incriminate him, or believes he does, and will take his own revenge,” he said quietly.

Ewart shrugged. “If we can’t work it out, why should they?” He laughed with surprising bitterness. “And if he succeeds, and gets caught, I, for one, shall not mind.”

The western sky was burning with the last embers, spilling fire across the water and casting them into black shadows from the Tower and the span of the bridge. The tide was running faster. But the air was still warm, and there were just as many people out strolling, some alone, some arm in arm with others. The sound of laughter came from somewhere just beyond sight.

Ewart shrugged. “We can’t stop them, sir.” The “sir” distanced him from Pitt, in a sense closing the subject. “If they know that much, they’ll almost certainly have the right person, and I’d say they deserve it. It’s a filthy thing to do, trying to get a man hanged for a crime he didn’t commit.”

His face was hard and weary, the light accentuating the lines. “Anyway, if you think you can stop Augustus FitzJames from executing his own form of justice on his enemies, pardon me for saying it, sir, but you just aren’t living in the world as it is. If there’s a crime committed, and we know about it, it is our job to try to sort it out. But a private hatred between gentlemen is not our business.”

Pitt said nothing.

“We can’t take the whole world on our backs,” Ewart went on, hunching himself as if he had become cold. “And it would be overstepping ourselves if we imagined we can do anything about it, or that we even should.”

“He refused our help,” Pitt said. “I offered and he refused, very firmly.”

“Doesn’t want you looking into the family too closely,” Lennox said with an abrupt laugh. “Costigan might have killed the girl, but Finlay’s conduct won’t bear too close an investigation if he wants an ambassadorship.” He spat the word out as if his teeth were clenched, although it was now too dark to see, and he had turned away from the light.

“Well, if that’s so,” Ewart said tartly, “you’d be best to leave it alone. He won’t thank you for ferreting around in Finlay’s life to find out who has cause to hate him, and why. You’d no doubt turn up some pretty shabby
behavior, and Augustus’ll direct his vengeance at you. And perhaps the law too. You’ve no cause to investigate Finlay now. We’ve got our man. Leave it alone, sir, for everybody’s sake!”

Lennox let out a little gasp as if he had stubbed his toe on a stone, but he was not moving.

Ewart was right. There was no legal ground for pursuing the subject, and Augustus FitzJames had made it unmistakably clear that he did not wish police assistance. Unless Pitt could deduce the answer from the information he already possessed, he was not going to resolve it.

“Then I’ll see you in court the day after tomorrow,” he said resignedly. “Are you going back that way?” He gestured towards the Queen’s Stairs.

“No, no, I’ll go home,” Ewart answered. “Thank you, sir. Good night.”

“Yes, I’ll come.” Lennox moved with Pitt, and they walked in companionable silence over the grass and down towards the steps and the water, then back up again to Great Tower Hill. It was almost dark.

They gave the evidence as precisely and exactly as they could, trying to rob it of emotion, and failing. Lennox in particular was white-faced, his voice high-pitched with the tension in his throat, his lips dry. Ewart was more practical, but a sense of triumph and relief came through his composure, and a hatred for the viciousness and the greed and the stupidity of it all.

There was not a large crowd. It was not a particularly interesting case. Albert Costigan was a name unknown outside the immediate area of the Whitechapel Road. Ada McKinley was merely an unfortunate woman who ran the risks of her trade and had met with a fate no one would have wished on her; but at the same time, no one was surprised, and only a few grieved. Pitt saw Rose Burke there the first day, and Nan Sullivan, surprisingly handsome in black. He did not see Agnes. If she came, he missed her in
the crowd. Nor was old Madge there. Perhaps, as she had said, she never left the house.

None of the FitzJameses attended, but then he had not thought that they might. As far as they were concerned, as soon as Finlay was exonerated that was the end of the matter. Thirlstone and Helliwell had never wanted anything to do with it from the first.

But Jago Jones was there, his startling face with its intensity making him extraordinary, in spite of his faded clothes, and no mark to distinguish him as a priest, no high white collar, no cross or sign of office. His cheeks were gaunt, hollowed under the high bones, and his eyes were shadowed as if he had slept badly for weeks. He listened intently to every witness. One might have thought from the attention he gave it that judgment was his, not the jurors’, and he in the end must answer for it.

It crossed Pitt’s mind to wonder if Jago was the priest chosen to try to save Costigan’s soul before his last, short walk. Would he be the one to seek a confession from him in the hours before execution, then to go those terrifying final steps to the gallows at eight o’clock in the morning? It was a task he would not have wished on anyone at all.

What were they to say? Something about the love of God, the sacrifice of Christ for all men? What would the words mean to Costigan? Had he ever in his life known what love was—passionate, unconditional, wide as the heavens, love which never faded or withdrew and yet was still just? Did he even understand the concept of sacrificing in order that someone else might benefit? Would Jago be speaking in a language that Costigan had never heard, of an idea as remote to him as the fires that burned in the stars?

Perhaps there was nothing more to do than speak quietly, look at him and meet his eyes without contempt and without judgment, simply as another human being aware of his terror and caring about it.

As Pitt stared across the courtroom at the inexorable process of the law, there was a ruthlessness about it
which frightened him also. The wigs and gowns seemed as much masks for the men behind them as symbols of the majesty of justice. It was supposed to be anonymous, but it seemed merely inhuman.

There was very little defense Costigan’s lawyer could offer. He was young, but he made a considerable effort at suggesting mitigating circumstances, a woman who was greedy and who cheated, even by the standards of behavior accepted by her own trade. He suggested it was a quarrel which had gone beyond control. Costigan had not meant to kill her, only to frighten her and dissuade her from her behavior, bring her back to their bargain. When he saw that she was insensible, he had panicked and thrown water over her to try, vainly, to bring her back to consciousness, not realizing at first that he had killed her.

The broken bones, the dislocations?

The cruelty and perversion of a previous customer.

No one believed it.

The verdict was never truly in doubt. Pitt knew that, looking at the jurors’ faces. Costigan must have known it too.

The judge listened, picked up his black cap and pronounced the sentence of death.

Pitt left the courtroom without any sense of achievement, simply a relief that it was finished. He would never know all that had happened, never know who had placed Finlay FitzJames’s belongings in the room in Pentecost Alley or why so many lies were told about them. He would never know what thoughts were so harrowing in the mind of Jago Jones.

After the statutory three weeks Albert Costigan was hanged. The newspapers reported it but made no further comment.

The Sunday after that Pitt was in the Park with Charlotte and the children. Jemima was dressed in her very best frock, Daniel in a smart new navy-and-white suit. It was mid-October and the leaves were beginning to turn.
The chestnuts, the first to break into bud in spring, were already limpid gold. The softer sunlight of early autumn flickered through them. The beeches showed fans of bronze amid the green. It would not be long till the first frosts, the raking up of leaves and the smell of wood smoke as bonfires consumed the waste. In the country, rose hips would be scarlet in the hedges, and hawthorn berries crimson. The grass would not need cutting anymore.

Pitt and Charlotte walked slowly side by side, indistinguishable from a hundred other couples enjoying one of the last really warm days of the year. The children ran around, laughing and chasing each other, largely pointlessly, simply because they had energy and it was fun. Daniel found a stick and threw it for a puppy that was dancing around them, apparently lost by its owner, at least for the time being. The dog ran for it and brought it back triumphantly. Jemima seized the stick and took a turn, hurling it as far as she could.

Over in the distance near the road a barrel organ was playing a popular tune. A running patterer abandoned the news and sat on the grass eating a sandwich he had just bought from a peddler a hundred yards farther along. An old man sucked on a pipe, his eyes closed. Two housemaids on their day off told each other tall stories and giggled. A lawyer’s clerk lay under a tree and read a “penny dreadful” magazine.

Charlotte took Pitt’s arm and walked a little closer. He shortened his step so she could keep pace with him.

It was several minutes before Pitt recognized in the distance, striding across the grass, the upright, military figure of John Cornwallis making his way purposefully between the strollers. When he was within twenty yards the expression on his face made Charlotte stop and turn anxiously to Pitt.

Pitt felt a chill run through him, but knew of no reason why he should be afraid.

Cornwallis reached them.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Pitt,” he apologized to Charlotte, then looked at Pitt, his face pale and tight. “I’m afraid I must interrupt your Sunday afternoon.” He obviously intended it to be the cue for Charlotte to excuse herself and leave them alone, withdraw to a discreet distance, out of earshot.

She did not do so, but instead held more tightly to Pitt’s arm, her fingers curling around and gripping.

“Is it a matter of confidence of state?” Pitt enquired.

“Dear God, I wish it were!” Cornwallis said with passion. “I am afraid by tomorrow everyone else in London will know.”

“Know what?” Charlotte whispered.

Cornwallis hesitated, looking at Pitt with concern. He wanted to protect Charlotte. He was unused to women. Pitt guessed he was acquainted with them only at a distance. He did not know other than convention taught him to expect.

“Know what?” Pitt repeated.

“Another prostitute has been murdered,” Cornwallis said huskily. “Exactly like the first … in every particular.”

Pitt was stunned. It was as if suddenly he had lost his balance, and the grass and trees and sky dissolved and shifted around him.

“In a tenement on Myrdle Street,” Cornwallis finished. “In Whitechapel. I think you had better go there, immediately. Ewart is on the scene. I shall find Mrs. Pitt a hansom to take her home.” His face was ashen. “I’m so sorry.”

8

P
ITT STOOD
in the doorway of the room where the body had been found. Ewart, gray-faced, was already there. From down the corridor came the sound of hysterical weeping, shock and terror still in the rising, desperate tones, long drawn out as a woman lost control.