Whitechapel Conspiracy

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 whomever 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.