The Whitechapel Conspiracy (14 page)

It took her a little over twenty minutes to reach the Bow Street police station, where until yesterday Pitt had been superintendent. She marched up the steps and inside as if she were going to war, and she felt much as if she were. During her childhood, police stations—and their inhabitants, whoever they were—had been places to be avoided at any cost.
Now she was going in deliberately. But it was in a cause for which she would have gone into the mouth of hell, had it been the only way. She was sufficiently angry she would have taken on anyone at all.

She went straight up to the desk sergeant, who looked at her with very little interest.

“Yes, miss? Can I ’elp yer?” He did not bother to stop chewing his pencil.

“Yes, please,” she said smartly. “I wish to speak to Sergeant Tellman. It is very urgent, and concerns a case he is working on. I have information for him.” That was a complete invention, of course, but she needed to see him, and any story that accomplished that would do. She would explain when she saw him.

The sergeant was unimpressed. “Oh yes, miss. And what would that be?”

“That would be ‘very important,’” she replied. “And it’ll not make Sergeant Tellman best pleased if you don’t tell ’im I’m ’ere. My name is Gracie Phipps. Yer go tell ’im that, and leave ’im ter do the choosin’ as ter whether ’e comes out or not.”

The sergeant looked for a long moment at her face, her unflinching eyes, and decided that in spite of her diminutive size she was determined enough to be a considerable nuisance. Added to which, he knew very little of Tellman’s personal life or family. Tellman was a remarkably taciturn man, and the sergeant was not certain who this girl might be. Discretion was the better part of valor. Tellman could be unpleasant if crossed.

“You wait there, miss. I’ll tell ’im, an’ see what ’e says.”

It took Tellman rather less than five minutes to appear. As always he looked lean, dour and so neatly dressed as to be uncomfortable with his tight collar and slicked-back hair. His hollow cheeks were slightly flushed. He ignored the desk sergeant and walked right across to where Gracie was standing.

“What is it?” he said half under his breath. “What are you doing here?”

“I come ter find out wot you’re doin’, more like,” she retorted.

“What I’m doing? I’m investigating burglaries.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You’re looking after a bit o’ thievin’, w’en Mr. Pitt’s bin throwed out o’ ’is job an’ sent ter Gawd knows w’ere, an’ Mrs. Pitt’s near beside ’erself, an’ the children got no father at ’ome … an’ you’re chasin’ some bleedin’ flimp!”

“It’s no pocket-picking!” he said angrily, but still keeping his voice low. “It’s a proper cracksman we’re after.”

“An’ that’s yer reason, is it?” Her disgust was withering. “Some ruddy safe is more important that wot they done to Mr. Pitt?”

“No, it isn’t!” His face was white with anger, both at her, for her misjudgment of him, and with the whole injustice of what had happened. “But there’s nothing I can do about it,” he said indignantly. “They aren’t going to listen to me, are they! They’ve already got someone else here, while his chair is still warm. Fellow called Wetron, and he told me to let it go, don’t even think about it. It’s done, and that’s that.”

“An’ o’ course yer bein’ the soul of obedience, like, yer jus’ do like ’e says!” she challenged, her eyes blazing. “Then I reckon as I’ll ’ave ter try ter fix it on me own, won’t I?” She bit her lip to keep it from trembling. “Can’t say as I’m not proper disappointed, though. I counted on yer ter ’elp, knowin’ that in spite o’ yer grizzlin’ an’ gurnin’ ’alf the time, yer still got a kind o’ loyalty, somewhere inside yer … ter bein’ fair, at least. An’ this in’t fair!”

“Of course it isn’t fair!” His body was rigid and his voice was almost strangled in his throat. “It’s wicked, but it comes from the power to do these things. You don’t know what they’re like, or who they are, or you wouldn’t talk about it like it was just a matter of me saying ‘Let’s do right by Mr. Pitt,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, yes, of course we will!’ and it’d all change. Mr. Wetron’s told me to let the whole thing drop, and I know he’s got his eye on me to see if I do. For all I know, he’s probably one of them!”

Gracie stared at him. There was real fear in his eyes, and
for a moment she was frightened too. She knew that he was more than fond of her, much as he wanted to deny it to himself, and that allowing her to see how he felt would cost him dearly. She decided to be a little gentler.

“Well, we gotta do summink! We can’t just let it ’appen. ’E in’t even at ’ome anymore.” Her voice trembled. “They sent ’im ter Spitalfields, not jus’ ter work but ter live.”

Tellman’s face tightened as if he had been slapped.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, yer do now. Wot are we gonna do about it?” She stared at him beseechingly. It was very difficult to ask a favor of him, with all the differences that lay between them, and the fighting against any admission of friendship. And yet she had not even considered not coming to him. He was the natural ally. Only now did she wonder at the ease with which she had approached him. She certainly did not doubt it was right.

If he noticed the “we,” and wondered at her inclusion of herself in the plan, there was no sign of it in his face. He looked profoundly unhappy. He glanced over his shoulder at the curious gaze of the desk sergeant.

“Come outside!” he said sharply, taking Gracie by the arm and almost dragging her through the door and down the steps into the street, where they could speak without being overheard by anyone but uninterested strangers.

“I don’t know what we can do,” he said again. “It’s the Inner Circle! In case you don’t know who they are, they are a secret society of powerful men who favor each other in everything, even to protecting each other from the law, if they can. They’d have saved Adinett, only Mr. Pitt got in the way, and they won’t forgive him for that. It’s not the first time he’s crossed them up.”

“Well, ’oo are they?” She was reluctant to let him see how much that thought frightened her. Anyone who could outwit Pitt had to be kin to the devil himself.

“That’s the point. Don’t you listen, girl? No one knows who they are!” he said desperately. “You look at someone in power, and they might be, and they mightn’t. No one else knows.”

She found herself shivering. “Yer mean it could be the judge ’isself?”

“Of course it could! Only it wasn’t this time, or he’d have found some way of getting Adinett off.”

She squared her shoulders. “Well, all the same, we gotta do summink. We can’t just let ’im be stuck in a filthy ’ole somewhere an’ never able ter come back ’ome again. Yer sayin’ as Adinett didn’t do in that feller, what’s-’is-name?”

“Fetters. No. I’m not. He did it. We just don’t know why.”

“Then we’d better find out, an’ sharpish, ’adn’t we?” she responded. “Yer a detective. Where do we start?”

A mixture of expressions crossed his face: reluctance, gentleness, anger, pride, fear.

With a stab of shame she realized how much she was asking of him. She had little to lose compared with what failure would cost him. If the new superintendent had deliberately commanded him to not enquire into the matter anymore, and to forget Pitt, and then Tellman disobeyed, he would lose his job. And she knew how long and hard he had worked to earn his place. He had asked no one any favors, and received none. He had no family still alive, and few friends. He was a proud, lonely man who expected little out of life and guarded his own anger at injustice carefully, cherishing his sense of fairness.

He had bitterly resented it when Pitt had been promoted to command. Pitt was not a gentleman. He was ordinary, a gamekeeper’s son, no better than Tellman himself and hundreds of others in the police force like them. But as they had worked together an unadmitted loyalty had grown, and to betray that would be outside Tellman’s sense of decency. He would not be able to live with himself, and Gracie knew that.

“Where do we begin?” she said again. “If ’e done it, then ’e done it for a reason. Less’n yer daft, yer don’t up and kill someone without a reason so good it’s like a mountain yer can’t get ’round no other way.”

“I know.” He stood in the middle of the footpath, deep in thought as carriages and wagons streamed past down Bow Street, and people were obliged to step into the gutter to get
around them. “We did everything at the time to find out why. Nobody knew of anything that even looked like a quarrel.” He shook his head. “There was no money, no women, no rivalry in business or sports or anything else. They even agreed about politics.”

“Well, we in’t looked ’ard enough!” She stood squarely in front of him. “What would Mr. Pitt do if ’e were ’ere?”

“What he did anyway,” he replied. “He looked at everything they had in common to see what they could possibly have quarreled over. We spoke to all their friends, acquaintances, everybody. Searched the house, read all his papers. There was nothing.”

She stood in the bright sun, chewing her lip, staring up at him. She looked like a tired and angry child on the brink of tears. She was still far too thin, and had to take up most of her clothes at the hem or she would have fallen over them.

“Yer don’ kill anyone fer nuffink,” she repeated stubbornly. “An’ ’e did it sudden, so it were summink ’as ’appened just ’afore ’e were killed. Yer gotta find out wot ’appened every day fer a week up until then. There’s summink there!” She would not bring herself to say please.

He hesitated, not out of unwillingness, but simply because he could think of nothing useful to be done.

She was staring at him. He had to give her an answer, and he could not bear it to be a denial. She did not understand. She had no idea of the difficulties, of everything he and Pitt had done at the time. She saw only loyalty, a matter of fighting for those she loved, who belonged to her life.

He did not really want to belong to anyone else’s life. And he was not ready to admit that he cared about Pitt. Injustice mattered, of course, but the world was full of injustice. Some you could fight against, some you couldn’t. It was foolish to waste your time and your strength in battles you could not win.

Gracie was still waiting, refusing to believe he would not agree.

He opened his mouth to tell her how pointless it was, that she did not understand, and found himself saying what he knew she wanted to hear.

“I’ll find out about Adinett’s last few days before he killed Fetters.” It was ridiculous! What kind of a policeman allows a slip of a maid to coerce him into making a fool of himself? “I don’t know when,” he went on defensively. “In my own time. It won’t help anyone if Wetron throws me out of the force.”

“ ’Course it won’t,” she said, nodding her head reasonably. Then she gave him a sudden, dazzling smile which sent his heart rocketing. He felt the blood surge up his face and hated himself for being so vulnerable.

“I’ll come and tell you if I find anything,” he snapped. “Now, go away and leave me to work!” And without looking at her again he swung around and marched back up the steps and in through the doorway.

Gracie sniffed fiercely, and with a lift of hope inside her went to find an omnibus back to Keppel Street.

Tellman began that evening, going straight from Bow Street, buying a hot pie from a peddler as he did most evenings, and eating it as he walked up Endell Street. Whatever he did, he must manage to do it without leaving any trace, not only for his own safety but for the very practical reason that if he were caught he would be unable to continue.

Who would know what Adinett had done, whom he had seen, where he had gone in the time immediately before Fetters’s death? Adinett himself had sworn that he had done nothing out of the ordinary.

He bit into the pie, being careful not to squash out its contents.

Adinett was of independent means and had no need to earn his living. He could spend his time as he wished. Apparently that was usually visiting various clubs, many of them to do with the armed services, exploration, the National Geographic Society, and others of a similar nature. That was the pattern of those who had inherited money and could afford to be idle. Tellman despised it with all the anger of a man who had watched too many others work all the hours they were awake and still go to bed cold and hungry.

He passed a newspaper boy.

“Paper, sir?” the boy invited. “Read about Mr. Gladstone? Insulted the laborers o’ the country, so Lord Salisbury says. Some get an eight-hour day—mebbe!” He grinned. “Or they brought out a new edition o’
Darkness an’ Dawn,
all about corruption an’ that, in ancient Rome?” he added hopefully.

Tellman handed over his money and took the late edition, not for the election news but for the latest on the anarchists.

He quickened his pace and turned his mind back to the problem. It would give him more than one kind of satisfaction to find out why Adinett had committed murder, and prove it so all London would be obliged to know, whether they wished to or not.

He was well-used to tracing the comings and goings of people, but always with the authority of his police rank. To do it discreetly would be very different. He would have to call on a few favors done in the past, and perhaps a few yet to come.

He decided to begin at the most obvious place, with hansom cab drivers he knew. They usually frequented the same areas, and the chances were that if Adinett had used a cab—and since he did not own a coach, that was quite likely—then he would more than once have come upon the same driver.

If he had used an omnibus, or even the underground railway, then there was almost no chance at all of learning his movements.

The first two cabdrivers he found were of no assistance at all. The third could only point him in the direction of others.

It was half past nine. He was tired, his feet hurt and he was angry with himself for giving in to a foolish impulse, when he spoke to the seventh cabdriver, a small, grizzled man with a hacking cough. He reminded Tellman of his own father, who had worked as a porter at the Billingsgate fish market all day and then driven a hansom half the night, whatever the weather, to feed his family and keep a roof over their heads. Perhaps it was memory which made him speak softly to the man.