by Anne Perry
There was no evasion possible. Margery Williams had described the four young men too precisely for there to be any but the faintest doubt, driven by hope, not reason. It had been the Hellfire Club: Thirlstone, Helliwell, Finlay and Jago Jones. Pitt was crushed by an inner misery. He walked slowly away from Mile End and towards Whitechapel. It would take him half an hour to reach Coke Street. He wished it could be longer.
He was passed by all sorts of people on their way home from offices: clerks with ink-stained fingers and stiff shoulders, some with squinting eyes after staring all day at the black letters on the white page. Shop clerks passed in twos and threes. Laborers would be finishing soon, going home to the piled tenements, each having their own narrow little place where their own people were, their own few belongings.
He crossed the street and only just avoided being struck by a hansom. It was getting dark, and considerably colder.
He turned his coat collar up and increased his pace without being aware of it. He did not intend to get there any faster; he was drawn by emotion, an anger and urgency within.
He was going straight down the Mile End Road, which would become the Whitechapel Road as it crossed Brady Street. From reluctance he had changed to wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible. He was striding along, barely seeing people on either side. The streetlamps were lit. Orange lights were brilliant through the gathering darkness, carriages mere looming shapes with riding lamps on either side, horses’ hooves clattering on the wet stones, wheels hissing.
He turned left down Plumbers Row, which led into Coke Street. It was the one time and place he was almost sure of finding Jago Jones, and he had a deep, perhaps irrational belief that Jago would not lie to him if he was faced with the truth.
He swung around the last corner and saw the cart under the gas lamp, the light shining on its handles, polished smooth where hands had gripped it day after day perhaps for generations. Jago Jones’s lean figure in his shabby clothes was still serving hot soup to the last ragged figures. Beside him, working in silent unison, was Tallulah FitzJames.
Pitt watched, leaning against the wall in the shadows, until they were finished and turned to start putting it all away. There was nothing left; there never was.
“Reverend Jones.” Pitt moved forward and spoke softly.
Jago looked up. He was no longer surprised to see Pitt. He had been here too often over the last weeks and months.
“Yes, Superintendent?” he said patiently.
“I’m sorry.” Pitt meant it. Seldom had he regretted any necessity so much. “I cannot let the matter rest.” He glanced at Tallulah, still tidying and packing away.
“What is it now?” Jago asked, his brow furrowed with puzzlement. “I don’t know anything else. I have spoken to Ella Baker once or twice, but she was a very self-sufficient woman. She had no need of my counsel.” He smiled ruefully. “At least, shall I say, she had no desire for it. I did not know her well enough to be aware of her agony. Perhaps that is my shortcoming, but at least for her, it is too late now.”
His face in the lamplight showed nothing but sorrow and a sense of defeat. He moved farther away so Tallulah could not overhear them. “Please don’t ask me to question her, Superintendent. Even if she could speak to me, whatever she said would be between her and God. All I could offer would be some shred of human comfort, and the promise that God is sometimes a kinder judge than we expect, if we are honest. And I think too, perhaps, harsher, if we are not.”
“Honest, Reverend?” Pitt heard the catch in his own voice.
Jago stared at him. Perhaps he heard more of the irony, some deeper understanding, and pain than before. He half turned towards Tallulah, then changed his mind, or perhaps his belief in what he could accomplish.
“What is it, Superintendent? You say the word as if it had some greater meaning for you.”
Pitt had not expected Tallulah to be there. His first instinct had been to have her leave, to face Jago with his knowledge alone. It was a matter of decency, not to confront the man before someone who obviously had the utmost respect for him. Now he realized Tallulah would have to know. It concerned her too closely. Finlay was her brother. Whatever was said here in the dark and the damp of Coke Street would eventually be just as devastating in the withdrawing room of Devonshire Street. The delay would not save her from misery.
“It does, when spoken between the two of us regarding the deaths of Ada McKinley and Nora Gough,” Pitt answered his question.
Jago’s eyes were unwaveringly steady.
“I know nothing about them, Superintendent.”
Tallulah had finished the packing away and moved closer.
“What about Mary Smith?” Pitt asked, and neither did he flinch. “Off Globe Road, in Mile End, about six years ago. Are you going—” He stopped. Jago’s face was ashen. Even in the yellow-white glare of the gas lamp he looked like a death’s-head. There was no point in finishing the sentence. Jago was not going to lie. A lie would have been grotesque now, an indignity beyond redeeming.
“You were there,” Pitt said quietly, trying to ignore Tallulah’s eyes, staring at him with dawning horror. “You, Thirlstone, Helliwell, and Finlay FitzJames.” He did not make it a question, and his voice left no room for doubt.
Jago closed his eyes very slowly. He was controlling himself with a supreme effort. He looked as if he might fall if for an instant he let go.
“I will answer for myself, Superintendent, but for no one else.” He swallowed hard. His clenched hands shook. “Yes, I was there. In my younger days I did many things of which I am ashamed, but none as much as that. I drank too much, I wasted my time and valued things which were of no worth. I cared what people thought of me, not for love. Not respect or honor.” He said the words bitterly. “Not whether I hurt people. Not whether my example was good or bad, only to posture and parade, wanting to be smarter and wittier than the next man.”
Tallulah was still staring at him, but he seemed oblivious of her, drenched in loathing of the man he had been. She moved a step closer, but still he was unaware.
“Globe Road,” Pitt said, bringing him back to the issue, not only because it was what mattered to him but because Jago’s other sins, whatever they had been, were not his to judge, nor did he wish to know them.
“I was there,” Jago admitted again. “I did not kill Mary Smith.” His voice sank to a whisper, hoarse, as if the memory of it were still before his eyes. “But I know what was done to her, God forgive me. I have spent the rest of my life since then trying to repay—”
“Who killed her?” Pitt said gently. He believed it was not Jago, not only because he wanted to, but there was a passion in his face, a torture of guilt and memory, a self-disgust, but also a courage that he had at last spoken the truth and at the same time kept his own kind of honor.
“I will not tell you, Superintendent. I’m sorry.”
Pitt hesitated only a moment. There was no real decision to make.
“Reverend …” He used the title intentionally. “Mary Smith was not only killed, she was tortured first and humiliated. She was tied to her own bed, with her stocking, intimate garments …” He saw the naked pain in Jago’s face, but he did not stop. “She was terrified and hurt. Her fingers and toes were either wrenched out of their joints or the bones were broken. She wasn’t a practiced whore!” He heard his own voice grating hard. “She was a young girl, just started—”
“Superintendent!” The cry was wrung from Tallulah. She stepped forward and was standing beside Jago, staring at Pitt. “You don’t need to go on. We know what happened to the girls in Whitechapel. We accept that Mary Smith was the same, and that it was very terrible. Nobody, no living creature, should be treated that way, and you must find out who did it, and they must be punished—”
“Tallulah!” Jago gasped, trying to push her away. His face was streaked in the damp of the evening, or in the sweat of inner pain. “You don’t …” He stopped, unable to go on. “You …” He drew in a lo
ng, shuddering breath, then turned to Pitt. “Superintendent, I understand what you are saying, and I know even better than you do just how … how fearful it was. I admit my part in it. I was there, and I helped conceal what was done. For that I am guilty. But I will not say more than that.
“I have done all I can in the years since then to become a man worthy of forgiveness. I began from my own sense of remorse. Now I do it for the love of the task itself. Someone has to care for these people, and my reward in it has been greater than any bound or measure. But I understand that I was an accessory after the fact in a murder, and an accomplice in concealing the truth. There is always a price. May I please take the cart back to the kitchen before I come with you? They will need it tomorrow. Someone will take over what I cannot.”
“I will,” Tallulah said immediately. “Billy Shaw will help me, if I ask him, and Mrs. Moss.”
“Thank you.” Jago acknowledged this without looking at her.
“I am not taking you, Reverend,” Pitt said slowly. “I don’t believe you murdered Mary Smith, and I know you didn’t murder either of the two women here at Whitechapel.”
Jago stood without moving, confused. Still, he could not bring himself to look at Tallulah. He kept his head turned away from her, unable to bear what he might see in her eyes.
Pitt hesitated.
“Jago,” Tallulah said softly, taking him by the arm. “You cannot protect him anymore. It was Finlay, wasn’t it? Somehow Papa managed to have it hidden, covered over. He must have bought the policeman.”
A rush of memory flooded over Pitt, a score of small impressions. Ewart’s pride in his son, the carefully bought education, the daughter who had married well. Such an achievement! But at what price?
He recalled Ewart’s eagerness to blame someone else, the look on his face when Augustus’s name was mentioned, the strange mixture of fear and hatred. It was hideously obvious now why he had destroyed the statements of the witnesses to the Globe Street murder and marked the case unsolved, and why he had not mentioned it to Pitt. What nightmares he must have endured when he thought Finlay had committed the same crime again, and Ewart again had to conceal it for him, but this time with a superior officer called in and handed the investigation over his head. No wonder he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, came into the station looking like a man who had opened a door on hell.
And then Pitt had arrested Albert Costigan, and it had seemed indubitable that he was guilty. He had not even denied it himself. Ewart must have thought himself free.
Then there was another crime, in Myrdle Street. A second nightmare for Ewart … a second torture of trying to prove Finlay had not done it, of guiding Pitt step by step away from Finlay and towards some other explanation, any other at all!
And Pitt had found Ella Baker. And she too had not denied her guilt.
Tallulah was standing very close to Jago, her arm around him, almost as if she were supporting him. Her face was wet with the settling mist, shadows around her eyes. Shock and misery were stamped deep into the lines of her features. But there was also a strength in her which had never shown itself before, almost a luminosity, as if she had found within herself something which she knew was precious, and indestructible, and, in time, of greater beauty than anything Devonshire Street could give her, or take from her.
“You cannot protect him,” she repeated, searching Jago’s face.
“Neither can I betray him,” Jago whispered, but he leaned a little towards her, half unwillingly, as if he did it against his will but could barely help himself. “I gave my word. I was also to blame. I went. I knew what was in him, the anger, the need for power, and I still went.”
“In Finlay FitzJames?” Pitt said.
Jago did not answer him.
Pitt knew there was no more purpose in pressing him. He had not yet sufficient evidence to arrest Finlay for the murder of Mary Smith, not if Jago would not speak. Margery Williams might recognize the four men, but six years had passed. And what was such a woman’s testimony against that of Finlay FitzJames and the weight of his father’s power?
Would Tallulah go home to Devonshire Street and warn Finlay? Might Pitt even get there and find Finlay gone, possibly to Europe, or even farther? Perhaps to America?
The three of them stood under the gaslight in Coke Street, motionless, Jago and Tallulah close, her arm around him, Pitt opposite. They were all cold. The damp had settled with a clinging, biting chill. Down on the river a foghorn sounded, thin and miserable, echoing across the water.
“Who put Finlay’s cuff link and club badge in Ada McKinley’s room?” Pitt asked curiously. “Was that you? Or one of the other two?”
“It wasn’t me,” Jago said with surprise. “I’d stake all I possess, which admittedly isn’t much, that it wasn’t either of them. Helliwell is terrified he’ll be tarred with the brush of disrepute, never mind murder. Thirlstone simply wants to forget the whole thing. The Hellfire Club broke up, and we swore never to see each other again.”
Tallulah looked from Jago to Pitt, her brow furrowed.
“It doesn’t make sense, Superintendent. The people whom you say killed the women live in Whitechapel. They can’t ever have heard of Finlay, much less have his possessions. And why would it be Mortimer, or Norbert either?” Her face was very white, her eyes hollow. “The one person it couldn’t be is Finlay himself.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “He was guilty the first time, but not the second. I know that, Superintendent, I swear I really know it! I did see him at the party!”
“I believe you, Miss FitzJames. Nor was it Ewart. He was desperate that Finlay should not even be seriously suspected, let alone charged. He may hate your father, he may hate Finlay, but he has everything to lose—his livelihood, his family, even his freedom—if Finlay is proved guilty. And I have a feeling that if that were to happen, your father, far from protecting him, would be the first to destroy him for having failed.”
Tallulah said nothing. She could not deny it, but it was too painful to agree. It was one step beyond what she could endure.
Jago’s arm tightened around her.
“There is something fundamental that you don’t know,” Jago said, almost as much to himself as to Pitt. “Something upon which this all turns.”
“What is it?” Pitt and Tallulah spoke at once.
“I don’t know,” Jago confessed. “I just know it exists, it matters terribly.”
But as he spoke, Pitt realized the thing that had been unresolved at the back of his own mind.
“Mary Smith,” he said aloud. “Such an ordinary name. Too ordinary. Who was she? Who was she really?”
Jago closed his eyes again. “I don’t know. She was young. She was very pretty, and very unhappy. God forgive us….”
“But it still doesn’t make any sense!” Tallulah protested, turning to Pitt. “You found Finlay’s things in the women’s rooms! Who could have put them there except whoever killed them? Had Mary Smith something to do with both Costigan and Ella Baker?” Her face wrinkled up with confusion. “But they wouldn’t kill two women just to blame Finlay! That’s insane.”
As he stood in the deepening chill, the mist now a halo of light around the gas lamp, another answer came to Pitt’s mind, absurdly simple, and tragic. If it was the truth, it would explain everything.
“I must go back to the police station,” he said. His voice sounded exactly as it had done moments before, yet he felt utterly different. It was an answer he did not want, and yet it intruded more and more fiercely into his mind, even the few seconds he stood there.
“I will take Tallulah … Miss FitzJames … back with me to Saint Mary’s,” Jago said, his face composed, his shoulders straight.
Pitt smiled, very slightly. It was a warm gesture, but a glimmer where he would have wished a beacon.
“That’s a good idea, Reverend. It may be the very best place for her. May I suggest you keep her there, if decency permits?”
“But …” Jago started.
“I k
now where to find you if I should need you,” Pitt cut him short. “But I don’t think I shall. I know you won’t testify against Finlay, and there is no one to testify against you. Keep on with your work here. It does much good. Good night.” And he swiveled around and walked away towards the corner. He turned once and looked back. He saw two figures under the lamp, but so closely entwined they could have been one, a man and a woman locked in an embrace for which each had imagined and dreamed and waited, until the reality was sweet beyond hope.
Ewart was startled to see Pitt. He looked up from his desk, his face calm, no suspicion in it, no dread of what was to come.
“Is Dr. Lennox in?” Pitt asked. “If not, please send for him.”
“Are you ill?” Even as he asked it, the light died out of Ewart’s face. He could see Pitt was not ill, only hurt and darkened in spirit.
“Get me Dr. Lennox,” Pitt repeated. “How well do you know him?”
“Er … moderately.” Ewart’s face was pale, the blood slipping out of his cheeks. “Why?”
“What did his father do?”
“What?”
“What did his father do for a living?” Pitt said again.
“I … I don’t think … I’ve no idea! Why?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “Has he done something he shouldn’t? What’s the matter, Pitt? You look dreadful. Sit down, man. I’ll get you a glass of brandy. Dr. Lennox!”
“I don’t want brandy.” Pitt hated this. Ewart was being considerate, in spite of the fear which was beginning to take hold of him. Pitt despised a bought man. Ewart had concealed a brutal murder, one of the vilest Pitt had heard of. God knows how many other things he had done at Augustus FitzJames’s behest. One coercion, one blackmail, led to another. One fall, and there was no road back, except by admission—and payment in full. And the police would not forgive one of its own for such an act of corruption. Mary Smith, or whoever she was, deserved better than that.
“Get me Lennox!” Pitt repeated between his teeth.
