Whitechapel Conspiracy

by Anne Perry

  “Police!” Remus gave a guffaw of laughter, full of anger and derision. “Police? Abberline was police—and Warren! As high as you like … commissioner, even.”

  “I know who they are,” Tellman retorted sharply.

  “Of course you do,” Remus agreed, nodding his head, his eyes glittering. The rain was heavier, and warm. “But do you know what they did? Because if you do, the next thing I know I’ll be in one of these alleys with my throat cut as well.” He took a step back as he said it, almost as if he thought Tellman might make a sudden lunge for him.

  “Are you saying Abberline and Warren were involved?” Tellman demanded.

  Remus’s contempt was withering. “Of course they were! How else do you think it was all covered up?”

  It was absurd. “That’s ridiculous!” Tellman said aloud, ignoring the rain, which was now soaking them both. “Why would someone like Abberline want to cover up murder? He’d have made a name for himself that would have gone down in history if he’d solved that case. The man who caught the Whitechapel murderer could have called his own price.”

  “There are some things bigger even than that,” Remus said darkly, but the tension and the excitement were back in his face again, and his eyes were bright and wild. The water was running down his face, plastering his hair to his head. Over the rooftops the thunder rumbled again. “This is bigger than fame, Tellman, or money, believe me. If I’m right, and I can prove it, it will change England forever.”

  “Rubbish!” Tellman denied it savagely. He wanted it to be false.

  Remus turned away.

  Tellman grabbed his arm again, bringing him up short. “Why would Abberline conceal the worst crimes that have ever happened in London? He is a decent man.”

  “Loyalty.” Remus said the word hoarsely. “There are loyalties deeper than life or death, loyalties deep as hell itself.” He put his hand to his throat. “Some things a man … some men … will sell their own souls for. Abberline is one, Warren’s another, and the coachman Netley—”

  “What Netley?” Tellman asked. “You mean Nickley?”

  “No, his name’s Netley. When he said Nickley at the Westminster Hospital, he was lying.”

  “What’s he got to do with them? He drove the coach around Whitechapel. He knew who Jack was, and why he did what he did.”

  “Of course he did … he still does. And I daresay he’ll go to the grave telling no one.”

  “Why did he try to kill the child—twice?”

  Remus smiled, his lips drawn wide over his teeth. “As I said before, you know nothing.”

  Tellman was desperate. The thought of Pitt’s being thrown out of office in Bow Street because he had stuck to the truth infuriated him. Charlotte was left alone, worried and frightened, and Gracie was determined to help, no matter what the danger or the cost. The thought of the whole monstrous injustice of it all was intolerable.

  “I know where to find a lot of senior policemen,” he said very quietly. “Not just Abberline, or Commissioner Warren, but a fair few more as well, all the way up, if I have to. Those two might be retired, but others aren’t.”

  Remus was ashen white, his eyes wild. “You … wouldn’t! You’d set them on me, knowing what they did? Knowing what they’re hiding?”

  “I don’t know!” Tellman responded. “Not unless you tell me.”

  Remus gulped and ran the back of his hand over his mouth. His eyes flickered with fear. “Come with me. Let’s get out of the rain. Come to the pub across there.” He pointed over the road.

  Tellman was glad to agree. His mouth was dry and he had already walked a considerable distance. The rain did not bother him. They were both soaked to the skin.

  Lightning flashed in a jagged fork, and thunder cracked overhead.

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in a quiet corner with glasses of ale and the smell of sawdust and wet clothes all around them.

  “Right,” Tellman began. “Who did you meet in Regent’s Park? And if I catch you in one lie, you’re in trouble.”

  “I don’t know,” Remus said instantly, his face pained. “And so help me God, that’s the truth. The man who put me onto all this, right from the beginning. I admit I wouldn’t tell who he is if I knew, but I don’t.”

  “Not a good start, Mr. Remus,” Tellman warned him.

  “I don’t know!” Remus protested, a kind of desperation in his voice.

  “What about the man in Hyde Park that you quarreled with and accused of hiding a conspiracy? Another mysterious informant?”

  “No. That was Abberline.”

  Tellman knew Abberline had been in charge of the Whitechapel murders investigation. Had he concealed evidence, even that he had known the identity of the Ripper, and not revealed it? If so, his crime was monstrous, and Tellman could think of no explanation that justified it.

  Remus was watching him.

  “Why would Abberline hide it?” he asked again. Then he framed the question that was beating in his mind. “What has Adinett got to do with it? Did he know too?”

  “I think so.” Remus nodded. “He was certainly onto something. He was at Cleveland Street, asking at the tobacconist’s, and at Sickert’s place.”

  Now Tellman was confused. “Who is Sickert?”

  “Walter Sickert, the artist. It was at his studio they met. That was in Cleveland Street then,” Remus answered.

  Tellman guessed. “The lovers? Annie Crook, who was Catholic, and the young man?”

  Remus grimaced. “How quaintly you put it. Yes, that’s where they met, if you like to phrase it that way.”

  Tellman assumed from his words that it was more than a mere meeting. But the core of it all still escaped him. What had it to do with an insane murderer and five dead and mutilated women?

  “You are not making sense.” He leaned a little forward across the table between them. “Whoever Jack was—or is—he wanted particular women. He asked for them by name, at least he did for Annie Chapman. Why? Why did you go asking after the death of William Crook in St. Pancras, and the lunatic Stephen in Northampton? What has Stephen to do with Jack?”

  “From what I can tell …” Remus’s thin hands were clenched on his beer mug. It shook very slightly, rippling the liquid. “Stephen was the Duke of Clarence’s tutor, and he was a friend of Walter Sickert. It was he who introduced them.”

  “The Duke of Clarence and Walter Sickert?” Tellman said slowly.

  Remus’s voice was half strangled in his throat. “The Duke of Clarence and Annie Crook, you fool!”

  The room whirled around Tellman as if he were at sea in a storm. The eventual heir to the throne, and a Catholic girl from the East End. But the Prince of Wales had mistresses all over the place. He was not even particularly discreet about it. If Tellman knew, then probably all the world did.

  Remus looked at Tellman’s blank face.

  “From what I know now, Clarence—Eddy, as he was called—was rather awkward, and his friends suspected he might have leanings towards men as much as women.”

  “Stephen…”Tellman put in.

  “That’s right. Stephen, his tutor, introduced him to a lot of more acceptable kinds of entertainment with Annie. He was very deaf, poor devil, like his mother, and found social conversation a bit difficult.” For the first time there was a note of compassion in Remus’s voice, and a sudden sadness filled his face. “But it didn’t work out the way they meant. They fell in love … really in love. The core of it is …” He looked at Tellman with a strange mixture of pity and elation. His hands were shaking even more. “They might have been married …”

  Tellman jerked his glass so hard that ale slopped over the edges onto the table. “What?”

  Remus nodded, shivering. His voice dropped to a whisper. “And that’s why Netley, poor Eddy’s driver, who used to bring him here to see Annie in Cleveland Street, tried twice to kill the child … poor little creature …”

  “Child?” Now it was plain. “Alice Crook …” Tellman gulped in air
and nearly choked. “Alice Crook is the daughter of the Duke of Clarence?”

  “Probably … and maybe in wedlock. And Annie was Catholic.” Remus was whispering now. “Remember the Act of Settlement?”

  “What?”

  “The Act of Settlement,” Remus repeated. Tellman had to lean right across the table to hear him. “Made law in 1701, but still in effect. It excludes any person who marries a Roman Catholic from inheriting the crown. The Bill of Rights of 1689 says the same thing.”

  The true enormity of it began to dawn on Tellman. It was hideous. It jeopardized the throne, the stability of the government and the whole country.

  “So they forced them apart?” It was the only possible conclusion. “They kidnapped Annie and put her in a madhouse … and what happened to Eddy? He died? Or did they … surely …?” He could not even say it. Suddenly being a prince was a terrible thing, isolated, frightening, one individual lonely human being against a conspiracy that stretched everywhere.

  Remus was looking at him with the pity still in his face.

  “God knows”—he shook his head—“poor soul couldn’t hear half of what was going on, and maybe he was a bit simpler than some. It seems he was devoted to Annie and the child. Maybe he created a fuss about them. He was deaf, alone, confused …” He stopped again, his face filled with misery for a man he had never seen but whose pain he could imagine too vividly.

  Tellman stared ahead at the scruffy posters and the scribbling on the pub wall, profoundly grateful that he was there and not in some palace, watched over by murderous courtiers, a servant to the throne and not master of anything.

  “Why the five women?” he said at last. “There has to have been a reason.”

  “Oh, there was,” Remus assured him. “They were the ones who knew about it. They were Annie’s friends. If they’d known what they were up against, they’d have disappeared. But they didn’t. Word has it they were greedy, at least one of them was, and led the others. They asked Sickert for money in exchange for silence. He told his masters, and the women got silence all right—the silence of a blood-soaked grave.”

  Tellman buried his face in his hands and sat motionless, his mind in chaos. Was Lyndon Remus the real lunatic? Could any of this fearful story be true?

  He looked up slowly, lowering his hands.

  As if reading his thoughts, Remus spoke. “You think I’m mad?”

  Tellman nodded. “Yes …”

  “I can’t prove any of it … yet. But I will. It’s true. Look at the facts.”

  “I am. They don’t prove it. Why did Stephen kill himself? How was he involved?”

  “He introduced them. Poor Eddy was quite a good painter. Sight, you see. No hearing needed. Stephen loved him.” He shrugged. “In love with him, maybe. Anyway, when he heard he was dead, God knows what he thought, but it finished him. Guilt, maybe, maybe not. Perhaps just grief. It doesn’t affect the story.”

  “So who killed the women?” Tellman asked.

  Remus shook his head a little. “I don’t know. My guess is Sir William Gull. He was the royal physician.”

  “And Netley drove the coach going around Whitechapel, looking for them, so Gull could carve them up?” Tellman found himself shaking with an inner cold the warmth of the tavern could do nothing to help. The nightmare was inside him.

  Again Remus nodded. “In the coach. That was why there was never that much blood, and why he was never caught in the act.”

  Tellman pushed away the last of his beer. The thought of eating or drinking made him sick.

  “We just need the last pieces,” Remus went on, his glass also untouched now. “I need to know more about Gull.”

  “He’s dead,” Tellman pointed out.

  “I know.” Remus leaned forward. The noise around them was increasing, and it was getting harder to hear. “But that doesn’t alter the truth. And I need to have every fact possible. All the speculation in the world won’t do any good without the facts that can’t be argued away.” He watched Tellman intently. “And you could get access to things I can’t. They know who I am, and they won’t tell me any more. I don’t have an excuse.” He nodded. “But you could. You could say it was to do with a case, and they’d talk to you.”

  “What are you going to do?” Tellman questioned. “What else do you need? And why? What will you do with it all when you have it, if you ever do? There’s no good going to the police. Gull is dead, Abberline and Warren are both retired. Are you after the coachman?”

  “I’m after the truth wherever it goes,” Remus said grimly. A large man hesitated near them, and Remus waited until he was gone before he continued. “What I really want is the man behind it, the one who sent them out to do these things. He may not have been within five miles of Whitechapel, but he is the heart and mind of the Ripper. The others were just the hands.”

  Tellman had to ask. The sounds of ordinary life were all around them, talking, laughter, the clink of glasses, the shuffling of feet, the splash of beer. It seemed so sane, so commonplace, that such things as they were speaking of were surely impossible. And yet stop any one of these men in here and mention the horror of four years ago, and a sudden silence would fall, the blood would drain from faces and eyes would go cold and frightened. Even now it would be as if someone had opened an inner door onto a darkness of the soul.

  “Do you know who that is?” Tellman’s voice was rough. He needed to drink to calm the dryness, but the thought choked him.

  “I think so,” Remus answered. “But I’m not telling you, so there’s no point in asking. That’s what I’m going after. You find out about Gull and Netley. Don’t go near Sickert.” There was sharp warning in his face. “I’ll give you two days. Meet me back here then.”

  Tellman agreed. He had no choice, regardless of what Wetron or anyone else might do. Remus was right; if what he supposed were true, then it was a far bigger issue than any individual crime, bigger even than solving the most terrible murders London had ever seen.

  But he could not forget Pitt, and his original reason for asking.

  “How much of this did Adinett know?”

  Remus shook his head. “I’m not sure. Some of it, that’s certain. He knew about them taking Annie Crook from Cleveland Street to Guy’s, and taking Eddy away too.”

  “And Martin Fetters? Where does he fit in? What did he know?”

  “Who’s Martin Fetters?” Remus looked momentarily confused.

  “The man Adinett murdered!” Tellman said sharply.

  “Oh!” Remus’s face cleared. “I’ve no idea. If it had been the other way around, and Fetters had killed Adinett, I would say Fetters was one of them.”

  Tellman stood up. Whatever he was going to do, it must be quickly. If Wetron caught him even once more, he might be dismissed. If he trusted Wetron, or anyone apart from Pitt, he would tell what he knew and be given time, almost certainly help as well. But he had no idea how far the Inner Circle stretched or whose loyalty lay where. He must do this alone.

  He left the public house and walked out into the thinning rain.

  If Sir William Gull had been the man who had carried out those fearful deeds, then Tellman needed to learn for himself everything about him that he could. His mind was crowded with thoughts and imaginings as he walked towards the main street and the nearest omnibus stop. He was happy to travel slowly. He needed time to absorb the story that Remus had told him and think what to do next.

  If the Duke of Clarence had really married Annie Crook, whatever form the ceremony had taken, and there were a child, then no wonder certain people had panicked to keep it secret. Quite apart from the laws of succession to the throne, the anti-Catholic feeling in the country was sufficiently powerful that knowledge of the alliance would be enough to rock the monarchy, fragile as it was at the moment.

  But if it was exposed that the most hideous murders of the century had been committed by royal sympathizers, perhaps even with royal knowledge, there would be revolution in the streets and the t
hrone would be swept away on a tide of rage which might destroy the government as well. What would arise afterwards would be strange, unfamiliar, and probably no better.

  But whatever it was, Tellman was filled with dismay at the thought of the violence, the sheer weight of anger that would shatter so much that was good, as well as the relatively little that was not. How many ordinary people who were now going about their daily lives would have everything they knew swept away? Revolution would change those in power, but it would create no more food, houses, clothes, no more worthwhile jobs, nothing lasting to make life richer or safer.

  Who would form the new government when the old was gone? Would they necessarily be any wiser or fairer?

  He got out of the bus and walked up the slope towards Guy’s Hospital. There was no time for subtlety. When Remus had enough evidence in his own mind, he would make it public. The man in Regent’s Park who had prompted him would make sure of that.

  Who was he? Remus himself had said he did not know. There was no time now to find out, but his motive was clear enough—revolution here in England, the end of safety and peace, even with all its iniquities.

  Tellman went up the steps and into the front door of the hospital.

  It took him the remainder of that day, talking to half a dozen different people about their recollections of the late Sir William Gull, to gain some impression of the man. What slowly gathered form was a picture of a man dedicated to the knowledge of medicine, most especially the workings of the human body, its structure and mechanics. He seemed impelled more by a desire to learn than by a wish to heal. He was driven by personal ambition and little visible compassion to relieve suffering.

  There was one particular tale he heard about Gull’s treatment of a man who died. Gull decided to perform a postmortem. The dead man’s elderly sister was so profoundly concerned that the body should not be left mutilated that she insisted on remaining in the room during the operation.

  Gull had not demurred, but carried out the whole procedure in front of her, removing the heart and putting it in his pocket to take away so that he might keep it. It revealed a streak of cruelty in him to the feelings of patients and their families that Tellman found abhorrent.