Whitechapel Conspiracy

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.

I have done all I can, and I have failed. I was warned, and I did not listen. In my foolishness I believed that a prince of the blood, heir to the throne of England, and so of a quarter of the world, would never betray his word. I lent him money, all I could scrape together, on a fixed term and at minimal interest. I believed that by so doing I could relieve a man of his financial embarrassment, and at the same time earn a little interest that I would be able to put back into my business, and benefit my workers.