Pentecost Alley (10 page)

A woman walked past with a bag of laundry on her hip.

“Did you know her personally?” Pitt moved over and leaned on his elbow, resting his weight on the other end of the barrow. He was appallingly tired. He should have accepted the soup.

“Yes.” Jago gave a tight smile. “But I’m not privy to her client list. Most of them are casual anyway. The one you’re looking for could be from anywhere. Occasionally she’d go to the West End. It’s not so far. She was handsome. She could have picked up someone from Piccadilly, or the Haymarket. Or for that matter it could be a sailor from the Port of London, passing through.”

“Thank you!” Pitt said tartly. It was time he said what he had really come for. The longer he evaded it, the harder it would be. “Actually, I came to you because you used to belong to a gentleman’s association called the Hellfire Club….”

Underneath his shapeless jacket Jago was rigid. His face in the waning light was curiously stiff.

“That was a long time ago,” he said quietly. “And not
something of which I am proud. What has it to do with Ada’s death? The club disbanded six or seven years back. Ada wasn’t even here then.”

“When did she come?”

“About five years ago. Why?”

“I don’t think it really makes any difference,” Pitt confessed. “I think it is exactly as you say … a man whose violence and need is his own, and has nothing to do with her, except that she was the one to provoke it. Or perhaps she was merely there at the wrong time, and it would have happened to whoever the woman was. It might have been her face, her hair, a gesture, a tone in her voice that jarred loose some memory in him, and he lost control of the hatred there was inside him, and destroyed her.”

“Fear,” Jago said, his mouth tightening. “Fear of failure, fear of not being what you want, what other people want.” He saw Pitt’s face and thought he read something in it, or perhaps he expected to. “I don’t mean a simple fear of impotence. I mean a spiritual fear of being weak, to the very soul, the fear which makes you hate, because you are too self-obsessed to love, too consumed by rage that you are not what you wished, that the road is harder, the price tougher than you thought.”

Pitt said nothing. Ideas raced through his mind as to how much Jago Jones was speaking of himself, his demands and expectations of his role as priest. Had he needed a woman, and used a prostitute because all decent women were closed to him in his chosen role? Had she then mocked him in her own disillusion? He could hardly be the vehicle of God to her when she had seen his fall from his self-imposed virtue.

Was this strange confrontation a kind of admission of guilt?

“We found a Hellfire Club badge under her body,” he said in the pool of silence in the street. Noises of wheels, horses and a man shouting from beyond the crossroads sounded remote, in another existence.

“Not mine,” Jago said carefully. “I threw mine in the
river years ago. Why have you come to me, Mr. Pitt? I don’t know anything about it. If I did, I should have come to you. You would not have needed to look for me.”

Pitt was not sure if he would or not. Jago Jones had the face of a man who followed his own conscience, whatever the law, and whatever the cost. Had it been one of his parishioners, confessing in terror or remorse, he doubted Jago Jones would have come with it to Bow Street, or anywhere else.

“I know it wasn’t yours,” he said aloud. “It was Finlay FitzJames’s.”

It was too dark to see the color of Jago’s face, but the sudden jerk of his head, the haggard look in his eyes and mouth betrayed the emotion which tore at him.

The silence was unbroken, heavy, like the gathering darkness. What horror was filling Jago’s mind? The death of a woman he knew made suddenly more vivid? Fear for his erstwhile friend’s peril, his embarrassment? Or guilt, because perhaps he had done as Thirlstone had suggested, and accidentally picked up Finlay’s badge instead of his own and left it at the scene of the crime?

“You don’t protest his innocence, Mr. Jones,” Pitt said very quietly. “Does that mean you are not surprised?”

“It … it doesn’t …” Jago swallowed. “It doesn’t mean anything, Mr. Pitt, except that I was grieved. I don’t believe Finlay guilty, but I can’t offer any explanation that would be of value to you, and certainly not any you won’t already have thought of yourself.” He shifted his weight a little. “Perhaps Finlay was there at some other time and dropped the badge, although I’m surprised he still wore it, very surprised indeed! Perhaps he even gave it to Ada in … in payment? The fact that she had it does not necessarily mean she obtained it that night.”

“You are struggling to be loyal to a friend, Mr. Jones,” Pitt replied wearily. “Which I respect, but I do not agree. Of course I shall pursue every piece of evidence, and every meaning it could have. If you should think of
anything more about Ada McKinley, or anything that happened last night, please let me know. Leave a message at the Bow Street Station.”

“Bow Street?” Jago’s dark eyebrows rose. “Not Whitechapel?”

“I work from Bow Street. Superintendent Pitt.”

“A Bow Street superintendent. Why are you concerned with the murder of a Whitechapel prostitute?” His voice dropped and there was a ripple of fear in it. “Do you fear we have another Ripper?”

Pitt shivered, cold in the center of his stomach.

“No. I was called in because of the evidence implicating Mr. FitzJames.”

“It’s too slender …” Jago swallowed hard again, his eyes on Pitt’s face, almost pleading.

“A man answering his description was seen, by two witnesses, at exactly the right time, and with Ada.”

Jago looked as if Pitt had struck him.

“Oh, God!” he sighed—a prayer, not a blasphemy.

“Reverend Jones, do you know something which you should tell me?”

“No.” The word came from a dry throat, stiff lips.

Pitt wanted to believe him, and could not. The honesty which had been between them had vanished like the yellow in the sky over the rooftops. The lamplighter had passed unnoticed. The gaslit moons made bright intervals along the way back towards the Whitechapel Road and the route home.

“Can I help you with the cart?” Pitt said practically.

“No … thank you. I’m used to it, and it isn’t heavy,” Jago refused, moving at last and bending to pick up the handles.

They walked side by side up Coke Street and turned the corner towards St. Mary’s. Neither of them spoke
again until they reached it and parted, then it was a simple farewell.

Pitt arrived home in Bloomsbury tired and unusually depressed. He ate the dinner which Charlotte had kept for him, then afterwards sat in the parlor with the French doors to the garden ajar, the warmth of the day fading rapidly and the smell of cut grass filling the air.

Charlotte sat under the lamp sewing. She had asked him about the case which had taken him out so early and kept him so late. He had told her only that it was a murder in Whitechapel and that the evidence implicated someone of importance and therefore was politically explosive.

He sat watching her now, the light on her hair, which was clean and bright, coiled on her head, shining like mahogany in the highlights, almost black in the shadows. Her skin was smooth, a faint blush in her cheek. She looked comfortable. Her gown was old rose, and became her as much as anything she owned. Her fingers worked, stitching and pulling, threading back into the cloth again, the needle catching silver as it moved. They were only a few miles from Whitechapel as the sparrow flew, yet it was a world so distant it was beyond imagination. Charlotte’s world was safe, clean, its values secure; honesty was easy, and chastity hardly a challenge. She was loved, and she could surely never have doubted it. She had no compromises to make, no judgments of value against survival, no weariness of soul, endless doubt and fear and self-disgust.

No wonder she smiled as she sat! What would Jago Jones think of her? Would he find her unendurably self-satisfied—unforgivably comfortable in her ignorance?

Charlotte pulled the needle in and out, watching because she could not work otherwise. She wanted to have something to do with her hands. It was easier. The day had been long. She had woken when Pitt did, and not really gone back to sleep again.

Her sister, Emily, had called in the middle of the morning. She had said little of any importance, but there was a restlessness in her which was uncharacteristic. It was not one of unused energy but rather of seeking something she could not find, or perhaps even name. She was critical, and had taken offense at several remarks which were not meant unkindly. That was unlike her.

Charlotte had wondered if it was the difficulty of having their grandmother resident in the house since their mother had remarried. Grandmama had refused to stay under the same roof with Caroline’s new husband. He was an actor, and several years Caroline’s junior. The fact that they were extremely happy only added to the offense.

But Emily’s dissatisfaction was not particular, and she left without explaining herself.

Now Pitt was sitting brooding silently, his brow furrowed, his mouth pulled down. She knew it was the case which troubled him. His silence had a particular quality she had grown used to over the years. He was sitting crookedly in his chair, one leg crossed over the other. When he was relaxed he put his feet on the fender, whatever the time of the year, and whether the fire was lit or not. On a summer evening like this, were he not absorbed in his thoughts, he would have walked to the end of the lawn, under the apple tree, and stood there breathing in the quiet, scented air. He would have expected her to go with him. If they had talked at all, it would have been of trivia.

Several times she had considered asking him about it, but his expression was closed in, and he had offered nothing. He did not want to speak of it. Perhaps he did not want its ugliness or its threat to intrude into their home. This was the one place where he could be free of it. Or if not totally free, then at least if it were mentioned at all, it would be of his own choosing, and not hers.

She knew he had been to Whitechapel, and she knew what it was like. He could not have forgotten the
numerous times when she had seen slum tenements, smelled the stinking gutters, the dark, narrow houses with their generations of filth seeped into the walls, the tired, hungry and anxious people.

But in order to help, one had to keep one’s own strength. Agonizing for people accomplished nothing useful. To help the masses one needed laws, and change of heart in those with power. To affect an individual one needed knowledge, and perhaps money, or some appropriate skill. Above all one needed nerve and judgment, one needed all one’s own emotional strength.

So she sat quietly and sewed, waiting until Pitt was ready to share with her whatever it was that bothered him, or to deal with it by at least temporarily forgetting and allowing himself to restore his spirit with what was good.

3

E
MILY RADLEY
,
Charlotte’s sister, about whom she had been concerned, was indeed dispirited. It was not a specific problem. She had everything she considered necessary to be happy. Indeed, she had more. Her husband was charming, handsome, and treated her with affection. She was unaware of any serious fault in him.

When they had met he had been well-born, living largely on his value as a lively, delightful companion and guest, his exquisite manners and his ready wit. Emily had been fully aware of the risks entailed in falling in love with him. He might prove shallow, spendthrift, even boring after the first novelty had passed. She had done it just the same. She had spent many hours telling herself how foolish she was, and that there was even a high possibility he sought her primarily for the fortune she had inherited from her first husband, the late Lord Ashworth.

She smiled as she thought of George. Memory was very powerful, a strange mixture of sadness, loss, sweetness for the times that had been good, and a deliberate passing over of those which had not.

All her fears had proved groundless. Far from being shallow, Jack had developed a social conscience and a considerable ambition to effect changes in society. He had campaigned for a seat in Parliament, and after his first defeat had returned to battle, and at the second
attempt had won. Now he spent a considerable amount of his time, and his emotions, in political endeavor.