The Whitechapel Conspiracy

by Anne Perry

  “Is there a way we can find out if the Clarence story is true?” he asked. He was not certain what he was reaching towards, only that inaction was surrender.

  “I don’t think it matters anymore,” she answered him, the anger softening from her eyes. “It could be true, and I doubt anyone could disprove it, which is all the Inner Circle will need. The outrage it would create would not hesitate for an instant to weigh or judge facts. If it is to be stopped, then it must be before it is said aloud by anyone outside the Circle.” The ghost of a smile touched her lips. “Like you, I am not certain whom I can trust. No one, I think, for morality. There are times when one stands alone, and perhaps this is one of them. But there are those whose interests I believe I can judge well enough to trust which way they will act when pressed.”

  “Be careful!” He was terrified for her. He should not have spoken; he was aware even as he said it. It was an impertinence, but he no longer cared.

  She did not bother to reply to that. “Perhaps you had better see if you can do something to help your Jewish friends. I think there is little purpose in your pursuing whoever really killed poor Sissons. He seems to have been a dupe all the way along—I think to some degree a willing one. He did not foresee death in the end. He had no idea of the power or the evil of the conspiracies with which he was meddling. There are so many idealists for whom the end will justify any means, men who began nobly ...” She did not complete the thought. It trailed away, carrying its ghosts of the past.

  “What are you going to do?” he pressed her, frightened for her, and guilty that he had come to her.

  “I know of only one thing that we can do,” she answered, looking not at him but into the distance of her vision. “There are two monstrous alliances. We must turn them upon each other, and pray to God that the outcome is more destructive to them than to us.”

  “But ...” he began to protest.

  She turned to face him, her eyebrows slightly raised. “You have some better thought, Thomas?”

  “No.”

  “Then, return to Spitalfields and do what you can to see that innocent bystanders do not pay the price for our disasters. It is worth doing.”

  He rose obediently, thanked her, and did as she had told him. Only when was he out in the morning traffic did he realize that he had still not had breakfast. The servants had been too conscientious to interrupt them with such trivialities as food.

  When Pitt had gone, Vespasia rang the bell and the maid came with fresh tea and toast. While she ate it her mind raced over all the possibilities. One thought underlay all of them, and she refused to look at that yet.

  First she would address the immediate problem. It hardly mattered that Sissons had not in fact lent money to the Prince of Wales, so long as the Inner Circle had contrived to make it seem as if he had. And she believed they would have taken care of all other appearances necessary to create the fraud. The sugar factories would close. That was the purpose of the murder. The ordinary men of Spitalfields would not riot unless their jobs were lost.

  Therefore she must do something to prevent that, at least in the short term. In a longer time some other answer could be found ... possibly even a grand gesture by the Prince? It would be an opportunity for him to redeem himself, at least in part.

  She went upstairs and dressed with great care in a gunmetal-gray costume with sweeping skirt and magnificently embroidered collar and sleeves. She collected a parasol to match, and sent for her carriage.

  She arrived at Connaught Place at half past eleven—not a time one called upon anybody, but this was an emergency, and she had said as much on the telephone to Lady Churchill.

  Randolph Churchill was waiting for her in his study. He rose from his desk as she was shown in, his smooth face severe, displeasure only moments away, held in by good manners, and perhaps curiosity.

  “Good morning, Lady Vespasia. It is always a pleasure to see you, but I admit your message occasioned some alarm. Please do ...”

  He was about to say “sit down,” but she had done so already. She had no intention of allowing anyone, even Randolph Churchill, to set her at a disadvantage.

  “... and tell me what I can do for you,” he finished, resuming his own seat again.

  “There is no time to waste in pleasantries,” she said tersely. “You are probably aware that James Sissons, sugar manufacturer in Spitalfields, was murdered yesterday.” She did not wait for him to acknowledge that he was. “Actually, it was intended to look like suicide, complete with a note blaming his ruin upon having lent money to the Prince of Wales, who had refused to repay it.

  As a consequence, all three of his factories would be ruined and at least fifteen hundred families in Spitalfields sent into beggary.” She stopped.

  Churchill’s face was ashen.

  “I see you understand the difficulty,” she said dryly. “It could become extremely unpleasant if this closure comes about. Indeed, along with other misfortunes which we may not be able to prevent, it could even bring about the fall of the government and of the throne ...”

  “Oh ...” he began to protest.

  “I am old enough to have known those who witnessed the French Revolution, Randolph,” she said with ice in her voice. “They too did not believe it could happen ... even with the rattle of the tumbrels in the streets, they disbelieved.”

  He relaxed back a little, as if the energy in him to protest had been drained away by fear. His eyes were wide, his breathing shallow. His fine, soft hands were stiff on the polished desk surface. He watched her almost unblinkingly. It was the first time in her life she had ever seen him rattled.

  “Fortunately,” she continued, “we have friends, one of whom happened to be the person who discovered Sissons’s body. He had the foresight to remove the gun and the note of debt, and destroy the letter, so the death appeared to be murder. But it is only a temporary solution. We need to see to it that the factories keep working and the men are paid.” She met his gaze unflinchingly, a tiny smile on her lips. “I imagine you have friends who would feel as you do, and be willing to contribute something towards that end. It would be a very enlightened thing to do, in our own self-interest, not to mention as a moral gesture. And if done in such a way that the public were to learn of it, I imagine it would meet with a considerable feeling of gratitude. The Prince of Wales, for example, might find himself the hero of the day—as opposed to the villain. That has a certain ironic appeal, don’t you think?”

  He took a very deep breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh. He was relieved; it glowed in his face in spite of any attempt to mask it. And he was also awed by her, very much against his will, and that was there also. For an instant he considered prevaricating, pretending to consider the idea, then he abandoned it as absurd. They both knew he would do it; he must.

  “An excellent solution, Lady Vespasia,” he said as stiffly as he was able, but his voice was not quite steady. “I shall see to it that it is implemented immediately ... before any real damage is done. It—it is fortunate indeed that we had a ... friend ... so well placed.”

  “And with the initiative to act, at considerable risk to himself,” Vespasia added. “There are those who will make life exceedingly difficult for him should they learn of it.”

  He smiled bleakly, pulling his lips into a thin line.

  “We shall assume that that does not happen. Now, I must set about this sugar factory business.”

  She rose to her feet. “Of course. There is no time to be lost.” She did not thank him for seeing her. They both knew it was even more in his interest than in hers, and she made no pretenses for him. She did not like him; she had profound suspicions, close to certainty, as to his deep involvement with the Whitechapel murders, although there was no proof. She was using him, and she would not affect to be doing anything else. She inclined her head very slightly as he passed her to open the door and hold it while she walked through.

  “Good day,” she said with a thin smile. “I wish you success.”r />
  “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 whoever 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 g
littering 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.