The Whitechapel Conspiracy (37 page)

A
FTER LEAVING CHARLOTTE
, Pitt walked on down the street towards the sugar factory. The heavy, sickly smell caught in his nose and throat, but not even the thought of standing the night watch there could dull the happiness that welled up inside him at having seen her, even for a short time. She was so exactly as his memory had re-created her in the long nights alone: the warmth of her, the line of her cheek, her lips, above all her eyes as she looked back at him.

He turned in at the factory gates, the huge building towering over him, the men jostling at his sides. All he wished to know was if they needed him that night. He called by to check most mornings.

“Yeah,” the senior watchman said cheerfully. He looked tired today, his blue eyes faded and all but hidden by the folds of his skin.

“Right,” Pitt replied regretfully. He would prefer a night’s sleep. “How is your wife?”

The night watchman shook his head. “Poorly,” he said with an attempt at a smile.

“I’m sorry.” Pitt meant it. He always asked, and the answer varied from day to day, but she was failing and they both knew it. He stayed and talked a few moments longer. Wally was lonely and he always wanted a listening ear to share his anxieties.

Afterwards, Pitt hurried back towards Saul’s workshop, now a trifle late. He was late from his first errand too, because
a wagonload of barrels had spilled out onto the street, and he stopped and helped the carter put them back. The little bubble of peace inside him made him impervious to the gray streets, the anger and the fear that set nerves on edge.

He went back to Heneagle Street early. Isaac was not home yet and Leah was busy in the kitchen.

“That you, Thomas?” she called as she heard his footsteps at the bottom of the stairs.

He could smell cooking, sharp, sweet herbs. He was more accustomed to them now and had grown to like them.

“Yes,” he answered. “How are you?”

She never responded directly. “Are you hungry? You should eat more … and not keep all those late hours at that factory. It’s not good for you.”

He smiled. “Yes, I am hungry, and I’ve got to do the early watch tonight.”

“Then come and eat!”

He went upstairs first to wash his face and hands, and found the clean laundry she had laid on the chest for him. He picked up the shirt on top, and saw that she had turned the cuffs for him, placing the worn edges to the inside.

A wave of homesickness washed over him so overwhelmingly that for a moment he was almost unaware of the room around him. It was a simple domestic kindness, the sort of thing Charlotte did. He had seen her spend all evening mending, turning collars or cuffs, needle clicking against her thimble, light flashing silver on it as it wove in and out in tiny stitches.

Then he was furious for so many women like Leah Karansky, who were never asked whether they wanted revolution or what price they would pay for someone else’s idea of social justice or reform. Perhaps all they wanted was their family safe at home at night, and enough food to put something on the table fit to eat.

He looked at Leah’s stitches on his cuff and knew how long it had taken her to do. He must thank her, let her know he was mindful of the kindness, perhaps talk to her about something interesting as he did. Or better, listen to her with all his attention while she talked.

After supper, still smiling at Leah’s stories, he walked into the sugar factory yard just as Wally arrived.

“Ah, you again!” Wally said cheerfully. “Wot d’yer do with all yer money, eh? Silk all day and sugar all night. I tell yer, somebody’s ’avin’ a soft life on yer labor, fer certain.”

“Me, one day,” Pitt said with a wink.

Wally laughed. “ ’Ere, I ’eard a good story about a candle maker an’ an old woman.” And without waiting he proceeded to tell it with relish.

An hour later Pitt made his first round of his area of patrol, and Wally went in the opposite direction, still chuckling to himself. There was still a skeleton staff working. The boilers never went out, and he checked in each room, climbing the narrow stairs past every floor. The rooms were small, the ceilings low to cram in as many storeys as possible. The windows were tiny; from outside in the daylight the building looked almost blind. Now, of course, it was lit by lamps, carefully guarded because the syrup was highly flammable.

Each room he passed was filled with vats, casks, retorts and huge dish-shaped boilers and pans several feet wide. The few men still working glanced around, and he spoke a few words to them and continued on. The smell of raw, almost rotting sweetness was everywhere. He felt as if he never got it out of his clothes and hair.

Half an hour later he reported back down to Wally. They boiled a kettle on the brazier in the open yard and sat on old hogshead barrels in which the raw sugar came from the West Indies, and sipped the tea until it was cool enough to drink. They swapped stories and jokes; some of them were very long and only mildly funny, but it was the companionship that mattered.

Once or twice there was movement in the shadows. The first time, Wally went to investigate and returned to say he thought it had been a cat. The second time, Pitt went, and found one of the boiler men asleep behind a pile of casks. His slight stirring had upset one of the casks and sent it rolling across the cobbles.

They each completed another round, and another.

Once, Pitt saw a man leaving whom he did not recognize. He seemed older than most of the workers, but then life in Spitalfields aged people. It was the cast of his features which caught Pitt’s attention: strong, fine-boned, dark complexioned. He kept his eyes averted, merely raising one hand in a quick salute, and light flashed for an instant on a dark-stoned ring. There was a sense of intelligence in him that remained in the memory even as Pitt returned to the yard and found Wally boiling the kettle again.

“Do many men leave shift at this time?” Pitt asked.

Wally shrugged. “A few. Bit early, but poor devils don’t get thanked for it anyway. Sloped off ’ome ter bed, I daresay. Good luck ter ’im. Wouldn’t mind me own bed.” He took the kettle off the fire.

“ ’Ere, did I ever tell yer abaht w’en I went up the canal ter Manchester?” And without waiting for an answer, he carried on with the tale.

Two hours later Pitt was halfway through the next round of the upstairs rooms when he came to the end of the corridor and saw Sissons’s office door ajar. He thought it had not been open the last time he was here. Had some worker been in there?

He pushed the door open, holding up his lantern. The room was wider than the others, and from seven storeys up in the very faint light of the false dawn he could see over the rooftops to the south, the silver reflection on the shining surface of the river.

He held his lantern high, turning around the room.

Sissons was sitting at his desk, slumped forward across its polished surface. There was a gun in his right hand, and there was a pool of blood on the wood and leather beneath him. But sharpest, glaring white in the lamplight that caught it, was a sheet of paper untouched by the blood, unstained. The inkwell was on the right of the desk towards the front, set in its own slightly sunken base, the quill resting in its stand, the knife beside it.

Cold, his stomach a little queasy, Pitt took the two steps over to Sissons, careful not to disturb anything, but he could
see no footmarks on the bare floor, no drops of blood. He touched Sissons’s cheek. It was almost cold. He must have been dead two or three hours.

He moved around the desk and read the note. It was written in a neat, slightly pedantic hand.

Beside it lay a note of debt for twenty thousand pounds, signed by the Prince of Wales. Pitt stared at them and they swam before his eyes. The room seemed to sway around him as if he were aboard a ship. He put his hands on the desk to steady himself. Sissons was beyond help. When the first clerk came in, when he was found, and the letter and note of debt with him, it would do more damage than half a dozen sticks of dynamite. An unrepaid loan to the Prince of Wales, for him to race horses, drink wine and give presents to his mistresses, while in Spitalfields fifteen hundred families went into beggary! Shops would close, tradesmen would go out of business,
houses would be boarded up and people would live on the streets.

There would be riots that would make Bloody Sunday in Trafalgar Square look like a playground squabble. The whole of the East End of London would erupt.

And when Remus was given the last piece of evidence he needed to expose the Whitechapel murderer as in the service of the throne, no one would care whether the Queen or the Prince of Wales, or anyone else, had known of it or wished it; there would be revolution. The old order would be gone forever, replaced by rage, and then terror, and then unrelenting destruction, the good and the bad torn apart together.

Law would be the first to suffer, the law that oppressed and the law that protected equally, and finally all law, even that which governed conscience and the violence within.

He reached for the letter. If he tore it up, no one else would ever know. Then he noticed beside it a pattern of tiny platters of ink with a large clear space in the center. It was a moment before he realized what it was; then he picked up the inkwell and placed it very carefully over the unmarked patch. It fit exactly. The inkwell normally sat to the left of Sissons! Had it been moved to make him seem right-handed?

Carefully he took the dead man’s left hand and turned it over, gently touching the insides of the first and second fingers. He felt the ridge where Sissons normally held a pen. Why?

He had been shot in the right side of his head … and someone had realized too late that he was left-handed.

A murder made to look like suicide … but by whom? And who might lie and say Sissons was right-handed, or could use either hand?

He must make certain this was seen as the murder it was. If he got rid of the gun, dropped it in one of the sugar vats, there could be no denying it.

This half of the conspiracy could be stifled. Then even if Remus broke the other story, the rage here in Spitalfields would not erupt. There would be anger, but against Sissons, not against the throne.

Was that what he wanted? His hand stayed in the air,
poised above the paper. If the Prince of Wales had borrowed money for his own extravagance and not repaid, even when it would bring ruin to thousands of people, then he deserved to be overthrown, stripped of his privileges and left as comparatively destitute as those in Spitalfields were now. Even if he became a fugitive, a refugee in another land, it was no worse than what happened to many. He would have to start again as a stranger, just as Isaac and Leah Karansky and tens of thousands like them had done. In the last analysis, all human life was equal.

What justice was there if Pitt concealed this monstrous selfishness, criminal irresponsibility, because the guilty man was the Prince of Wales? It made him party to the sin.

And if he did not, then countless people who had no say in it at all would be consumed by the violence which would follow, and the destruction which would leave poverty and waste behind it, perhaps for a generation.

His mind was in turmoil. Every belief he had lived by forbade he conceal the truth of the debt. Yet even as his thoughts raced, his hand closed over the paper. He crunched it up, then unfolded it and tore it across again and again until it was in tiny pieces. Not yet certain why, he put the note of debt far down inside his shirt, next to his body.

He was shivering, the sweat standing out cold on his skin. He had committed himself. There was no way to turn back.

If this had to be known as murder, then he must make it look like one. He had surely known enough murders to know what the police would look for. Sissons had been dead for at least two or three hours. There was no danger they would suspect him. Better it should be an impersonal robbery than hatred or revenge, which would indicate someone who knew him.

Was there money in the office? He should make it look as if it had been searched, at the very least. And quickly. He must not seem to have stood there debating what to do. An honest man would have raised the alarm immediately. He had already delayed almost too long. There was no time for indecision.

He pulled out the desk drawers and tipped them onto the floor, then the files. There was a little petty cash. He could not
bring himself to take it. Instead he put it under one of the drawers and replaced it. It was not very satisfactory, but it would have to do.

He riffled quickly through other pieces of paper to see if there was anything else about the Prince’s loan. They seemed to be all concerning the factory and its daily running, orders and receipts, a few letters of intent. Then one caught his eye because he knew the handwriting. Coldness filled him as he read it.