The Whitechapel Conspiracy (41 page)

“Good day,” she said with a thin smile. “I wish you success.”

“Good day, Lady Vespasia,” he replied. He was grateful, but to circumstance, common interest, not to her.

There was one other matter, a darker, far more painful one, but she was not yet ready to face that.

Pitt spent the journey from Vespasia’s house back to Spitalfields turning over in his mind what he could do to prevent some innocent man from being made the scapegoat for Sissons’s murder. He had heard all the rumors that were on the street as to whom the police suspected. The latest drawings looked more and more like Isaac. It could be only a matter of days at the most, perhaps hours, before his name was mentioned. Harper would see to it. He had to arrest someone to diffuse the mounting anger. Isaac Karansky would do very well. His crime was being a Jew and different, a leader of a clearly identifiable community that looked after its own. Sissons’s death was merely the excuse. Usury was a common enemy, an unproven charge, but fixed in the mind over centuries of word of mouth, gossip, and blame for a dozen otherwise inexplicable ills.

Pitt had one advantage: he had been on the scene first and was therefore a witness. He could find a reason to go back to Harper and speak to him.

When he got off the train at the Aldgate Street station he had already made the decision and was only settling in his mind exactly what he would say.

He walked briskly. Someone must have killed Sissons, but as Vespasia had said, it would be a member of the Inner Circle. He would almost certainly never find out who that was. Harper would do all he could to see to that.

By the afternoon the streets were hot and sour-smelling, the gutters nearly dry, refuse piling up. Tempers were short.
There was fear in the air. People seemed unable to concentrate on trivial tasks. Quarrels exploded over nothing: a mistake in change, one man bumping into another, a dropped load, a stubborn horse, a cart badly parked.

Constables on the beat were tense, truncheons swinging by their sides. Both men and women shouted abuse at them. Now and then someone bolder threw a stone or a rotten vegetable. Children whimpered without knowing what they were afraid of.

A pickpocket was caught and beaten bloody. No one intervened, or sent for the police.

Pitt still did not know whether he could trust Narraway, but perhaps he could learn something from him without giving away anything himself.

Narraway might be Inner Circle, or he might be a Mason, and willing to do anything, risk anything, to save the order of things as they were, the vested power, the throne. Or he might be neither, simply what he claimed: a man trying to control the anarchists and prevent riot in London.

Pitt found him in the same back room as always. He looked tired and ill at ease.

“What do you want?” Narraway asked curtly.

Pitt had changed his mind a dozen times as to what he would say, and he was still uncertain. He studied Narraway’s face: the level brows, the clever, deep-set eyes and the heavy lines from nose to mouth. It would be unwise to underestimate him.

“Karansky didn’t kill James Sissons,” he said bluntly. “It’s Harper’s way of putting the blame somewhere. He’s coercing the witnesses, making that description up.”

“Oh? Sure of that, are you?” Narraway asked, his voice expressionless.

“Aren’t you?” Pitt demanded. “You know Spitalfields, and you put me to lodge with Karansky. Did you think him capable of murder?”

“Most men are capable of murder, Pitt, if the stakes are high enough, even Isaac Karansky. And if you don’t know that, you shouldn’t be in this kind of work.”

Pitt accepted the rebuke. He had worded the question too clumsily. His nerves were showing.

“Did you think he was planning insurrection? Or the punishment of borrowers who don’t pay usury?” he corrected himself.

Narraway twisted his mouth into a grimace. “No. I never thought he was a moneylender in the first place. He is head of a group of Jews who look after their own. It’s a charity, not a business.”

Pitt was startled. He had not realized that Narraway knew that. A little of the tension eased inside him.

“Harper thinks he can blame him. Every few hours he’s getting closer,” he said urgently. “They’ll arrest him if they can create one more piece of evidence. And with the high anti-Jewish feeling at the moment, that won’t be hard.”

Narraway looked tired, and there was a thread of disappointment in his voice. “Why are you telling me that, Pitt? Do you imagine I don’t know?”

Pitt drew in his breath sharply, ready to challenge him, to accuse him of indifference, neglect of duty or even of honor. Then he looked more closely at his eyes and saw the disillusion, the inner weariness of a series of defeats, and he let his breath out again without saying what was on his tongue. Should he trust Narraway with the truth? Was Narraway a cynic, an opportunist who would side with whomever he thought would be the ultimate winner? Or a man exhausted by too many losses, petty injustices and despair? Too much knowledge of a sea of poverty—cheek by jowl with affluence. It required a very special depth of courage to continue fighting battles when you knew you could not win the war.

“Don’t stand there cluttering up my office, Pitt,” Narraway said impatiently. “I know the police are after a scapegoat, and Karansky will do nicely. They are still smarting over the Whitechapel murders four years ago. They won’t let this one go unsolved, whether the solution fits or not. They want a resolution that people will praise them for, and Karansky suits. If I could save him, I would. He’s a good man. The best advice I
can give is for him to get out of London. Take a ship to Rotterdam, or Bremen, or wherever the next one is going to.”

Arguments teemed in Pitt’s head: about honor, surrender to anarchy and injustice, questions about the very existence of law if this was all it was worth. They faded before he spoke them. Narraway must have said them all to himself. They were new to Pitt. They shook his belief in the principles that had guided him all his life; they undermined the value of everything he had worked for, all his assumptions of the society of which he had thought himself a part. When it came to the final decision, if all the law could say to a man unjustly accused was “Run,” then why should any man honor or trust the law? Its ideals were hollow—beautiful, but containing nothing, like a shining bubble, to burst at the first prick of a needle.

He hunched his body, shoving his hands hard into his pockets.

“They knew who the Whitechapel murderer was, and why,” he said boldly. “They concealed it to protect the throne.” He watched for Narraway’s reaction.

Narraway sat very still. “Did they, indeed?” he said softly. “And how do you believe catching him would have affected the throne, Pitt?”

Pitt felt cold. He had made a mistake. In that instant he knew it. Narraway was one of them—not Inner Circle, but Masons, like Abberline, and Commissioner Warren, and God knew who else … certainly the Queen’s late physician, Sir William Gull. He had a moment’s panic, an almost overwhelming physical urge to turn and run out of the door, out of the shop and down the street, and disappear somewhere into those gray alleys and hide. He knew he could not do it quickly enough. He would be found. He did not even know who else worked for Narraway.

And he was angry. It made no sense, but the anger was greater.

“Because the murders were committed to conceal the Duke of Clarence’s marriage to a Catholic woman called
Annie Crook, and the fact that they had a child,” he said harshly.

Narraway’s eyes widened so fractionally Pitt was not certain if he had seen it or imagined it. Surprise? At the fact, or that Pitt knew it?

“You discovered this since you’ve been in Spitalfields?” Narraway asked. He licked his lips as if his mouth were dry.

“No. I was told it,” Pitt replied. “There is a journalist who has all the pieces but one or two. At least he had. He may have them all by now, except the newspapers haven’t printed it yet.”

“I see. And you didn’t think it appropriate to inform me of this?” Narraway’s face was unreadable, his eyes glittering beneath lowered lids, his voice very soft, dangerously polite.

Pitt spoke the truth. “The Masons are responsible for it … that is what happened. The Inner Circle are feeding it to the journalist piece by piece, to break it at a time of their own choosing. Half the senior police in charge were in on the original crime. Sissons’s murder was Inner Circle. You could be either. I have no way of knowing.”

Narraway took a deep breath and his body slumped. “Then you took a hell of a risk telling me, didn’t you? Or are you going to say you have a gun in your pocket, and if I make the wrong choice you’ll shoot me?”

“No, I haven’t.” Pitt sat down opposite him in the only other chair. “And the risk is worth it. If you’re a Mason, you’ll stop the Inner Circle, or try to. If you are Circle, you’ll expose the Masons and, I daresay, bring down the throne, but you’ll have to reinstate Sissons’s death as a suicide to do that, and at least that will save Karansky.”

Narraway sat up slowly, straightening his back. There was a hard edge to his voice when he spoke. His fine hands lay loosely on the tabletop, but the anger in him was unmistakable, and the warning.

“I suppose I should be grateful you’ve told me at last.” The sarcasm cut, but it was against himself as much as Pitt. For a moment it seemed as if he was going to add something, then he changed his mind.

Pitt wondered if Narraway felt the same anger, the same confusion that the law was not only failing here, but that there was no higher power to address, no greater justice beyond, to which they could turn. It was corrupted at the core.

“Go and do what you can for Karansky,” Narraway said flatly. “And, in case you have doubts about it, that is an order.”

Pitt almost smiled. It was the one faint light in the gloom. He nodded, then stood up and left. He would go straight to Heneagle Street. It was a bitter thought that he, who had served the law all his adult life, was now helpless to do anything more for justice than warn an innocent man and help him to become a fugitive, because the law offered him no safety and no protection. He would have to leave behind his home, his friends, the community he had served and honored, all the life he had built for himself in the country he had believed would afford him shelter and a new chance.

But Pitt would do it, if he had to pack for them himself and walk with them down to the quay, purchase their tickets in his own name, and bribe or coerce some cargo captain to take them.

Outside, the street was hot and dusty. The stench of effluent hung sour in the air. Chimneys belched smoke, dimming the sunlight.

Pitt walked quickly southwards. He would find Isaac and warn him this afternoon. He passed a newspaper seller and glanced sideways to see the headlines … still the same drawing, but now there was a black caption underneath it—
WANTED—SUGAR FACTORY MURDERER—
just in case anyone had overlooked his offense against the community. The picture seemed to be changing slightly with each reprint, looking more than ever like Isaac.

Pitt increased his pace. He passed peddlers and draymen, carters, beggars, a running patterer making a rhyme about Sissons’s murder. He went so far as to say what everyone else was thinking: the killer was a moneylender teaching a bad debtor to pay his dues. It was a clever piece of doggerel. He did not use the word
Jews,
but the suggested rhyme did it for him.

Pitt reached Heneagle Street and went in at the front door and straight through to the kitchen. Leah was standing by the stove. There was a pot simmering, and the smell of herbs was sweet in the air. Isaac was on the far side of the table, and there were two soiled cloth bags on the floor beside him.

He turned sharply as Pitt came in. His face was deeply lined, his eyes dull with exhaustion. There was no need to ask if he had seen the posters or understood what they meant.

“You must go!” Pitt heard his own voice unintentionally sharp, fear and anger in it. This was England. They had done nothing; an innocent man should not have to flee from the law.

“We are going,” Isaac answered, putting on his old jacket. “We were only waiting for you.”

“Your supper is on the stove,” Leah told him. “There’s bread in the pantry. Clean shirts are on your dresser—”

There was the sound of heavy knocking on the door.

“Go!” Pitt said desperately, the word choking him.

Isaac took Leah by the arm, half pushing her towards the large back windows.

“There’s soap in the cupboard,” she said to Pitt. “You’ll find—”

There was more thunderous banging at the front of the house.

“We’ll get word to you through Saul,” Isaac said as he opened the window and Pitt moved towards the corridor. “God be with you.” And he half lifted Leah out.

“And with you,” Pitt replied. The pounding on the front door was so loud it threatened to break the hinges. Without waiting to watch them leave, he went along the short corridor and undid the latch just as another blow landed on the paneling which might well have burst the hinge had he not opened it first.

Harper was standing on the other side, with Constable Jenkins beside him, looking profoundly unhappy.

“Well, you again!” Harper said with a smile. “Fancy that, then.” He pushed past Pitt and strode down to the kitchen. He found it empty. He looked puzzled, wrinkling his nose at the
smell of the unfamiliar herbs. “Where are they, then? Where’s Isaac Karansky?”

“I don’t know,” Pitt said, feigning slight surprise. “Mrs. Karansky just went out to buy something she forgot for the meal.” He indicated the pot simmering on the range.

Harper swiveled around on his heel, frustrated but not yet suspicious. He inspected the pot, the half-prepared meal, the domesticity of the kitchen. Isaac’s best jacket was hanging on a hook behind the door. Pitt silently thanked God for the knowledge of fear which had driven him to leave it there, in spite of its value. He looked at Harper with a hatred he could not even try to conceal. It burned inside him with a sharp, grinding pain.

Harper pulled out one of the chairs and sat down. “Then we’ll wait for them,” he announced.