Whitechapel Conspiracy

Pitt went by train straight to the address to the north of Spitalfields that Cornwallis had given him. It proved to be a small house behind a shop. Victor Narraway was waiting for him. Pitt saw that he was a lean man with a shock of dark hair, threaded with gray, and a face in which the intelligence was dangerously obvious. He could not be inconspicuous once one met his eyes.

He surveyed Pitt with interest.

“Sit down,” he ordered, indicating the plain wooden chair opposite him. The room was very sparsely furnished, with no more than a chest with drawers, all of which were locked, a small table, and two chairs. Probably it had originally been a scullery.

Pitt obeyed. He was dressed in his oldest clothes, the ones he used when he wished to go into the poorer areas unnoticed. It was a long time since he had last found it necessary. These days he employed other people for such tasks. He felt uncomfortable, dirty, and at a complete disadvantage. It was as if his years of success had been swept away, nothing but a dream, or a wish.

“Can’t see that you’ll be a great deal of use to me,” Narraway said grimly. “But I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, I suppose. You’ve been foisted on me, so I’d better make the best of it. I thought you were noted for your handling of scandal among the gentry. Spitalfields doesn’t seem like your patch.”

“It isn’t,” Pitt said grudgingly. “Mine was Bow Street.”

“And where the hell did you learn to speak like that?” Narraway’s eyebrows rose. His own voice was good—he had the diction of birth and education—but it was not better than Pitt’s.

“I was taught in the schoolroom along with the son of the house,” Pitt replied, remembering it sharply even now, the sunlight through the windows, the tutor with his cane and his eyeglasses, the endless repetitions until he was satisfied. Pitt had resented it at first, then become fascinated. Now he was grateful.

“Fortunate for you,” Narraway said with a tight smile. “Well, if you’re going to be any use here, you’ll have to unlearn it, and rapidly. You look like a peddler or a vagrant, and you sound like a refugee from the Athenaeum!”

“I can sound like a peddler if I want to,” Pitt retorted. “Not a local one, but I’d be a fool to try that. They’ll know their own.”

Narraway’s expression eased for the first time, and a glint of acceptance shone for an instant in his eyes. It was a first step, no more. He nodded.

“Most of the rest of London has no idea how serious it is,” he said grimly. “They all know there is unrest. It’s more than that.” He was watching Pitt closely. “We are not talking of the odd lunatic with a stick of dynamite, although we’ve certainly got them too.” A brief flicker of irony crossed his face. “Only a month or two ago we had a man who tried to flush dynamite down the lavatory and blocked the drains up until his landlady complained. The workmen who took up the drains and found it had no idea what it was. Some poor fool thought it would be useful to mend cracks in something or other, and put it on the floor of his loft to dry out, and blew the whole place to smithereens. Took half the house away.”

It was farce, but bitter and deadly. One laughed at the absurdity of it, but the tragedy was left.

“If it’s not the odd nihilist achieving his ambition,” Pitt asked, “then what is it we are really looking for?”

Narraway smiled, relaxing a little. He settled in his chair, crossing his legs. “We’ve always had the Irish problem, and I don’t imagine it’ll go away, but for the moment it is not our main concern. There are still Fenians around, but we arrested quite a few last year, and they’re fairly quiet. There is strong anti-Catholic feeling in general.”

“Dangerous?”

He looked at Pitt’s expression of doubt. “Not in itself,” he said tartly. “You have a lot to learn. Start by being quiet and listening! Get something to do to explain your existence. Walk ’round the streets here. Keep your eyes open and your mouth closed. Listen to the idle talk, hear what is said and what isn’t. There’s an anger in the air that wasn’t here ten years ago, or perhaps fifteen. Remember Bloody Sunday in ’88, and the murders in Whitechapel that autumn? It’s four years later now, and four years worse.”

Of course Pitt remembered the summer and autumn of ’88. Everyone did. But he had not realized the situation was still so close to violence. He had imagined it one of those sporadic eruptions which happens from time to time and then dies down again. Part of him wondered if Narraway were overdramatizing it, perhaps to make his own role more important. There was much rivalry within the different branches of those who enforced the law, each guarding his own realm and trying to increase it at the cost of others.

Narraway read his face as if he had spoken.