Whitechapel Conspiracy

“Well, yer do now. Wot are we gonna do about it?” She stared at him beseechingly. It was very difficult to ask a favor of him, with all the differences that lay between them, and the fighting against any admission of friendship. And yet she had not even considered not coming to him. He was the natural ally. Only now did she wonder at the ease with which she had approached him. She certainly did not doubt it was right.

If he noticed the “we,” and wondered at her inclusion of herself in the plan, there was no sign of it in his face. He looked profoundly unhappy. He glanced over his shoulder at the curious gaze of the desk sergeant.

“Come outside!” he said sharply, taking Gracie by the arm and almost dragging her through the door and down the steps into the street, where they could speak without being overheard by anyone but uninterested strangers.

“I don’t know what we can do,” he said again. “It’s the Inner Circle! In case you don’t know who they are, they are a secret society of powerful men who favor each other in everything, even to protecting each other from the law, if they can. They’d have saved Adinett, only Mr. Pitt got in the way, and they won’t forgive him for that. It’s not the first time he’s crossed them up.”

“Well, ’oo are they?” She was reluctant to let him see how much that thought frightened her. Anyone who could outwit Pitt had to be kin to the devil himself.

“That’s the point. Don’t you listen, girl? No one knows who they are!” he said desperately. “You look at someone in power, and they might be, and they mightn’t. No one else knows.”

She found herself shivering. “Yer mean it could be the judge ’isself?”

“Of course it could! Only it wasn’t this time, or he’d have found some way of getting Adinett off.”

She squared her shoulders. “Well, all the same, we gotta do summink. We can’t just let ’im be stuck in a filthy ’ole somewhere an’ never able ter come back ’ome again. Yer sayin’ as Adinett didn’t do in that feller, what’s-’is-name?”

“Fetters. No. I’m not. He did it. We just don’t know why.”

“Then we’d better find out, an’ sharpish, ’adn’t we?” she responded. “Yer a detective. Where do we start?”

A mixture of expressions crossed his face: reluctance, gentleness, anger, pride, fear.

With a stab of shame she realized how much she was asking of him. She had little to lose compared with what failure would cost him. If the new superintendent had deliberately commanded him to not enquire into the matter anymore, and to forget Pitt, and then Tellman disobeyed, he would lose his job. And she knew how long and hard he had worked to earn his place. He had asked no one any favors, and received none. He had no family still alive, and few friends. He was a proud, lonely man who expected little out of life and guarded his own anger at injustice carefully, cherishing his sense of fairness.

He had bitterly resented it when Pitt had been promoted to command. Pitt was not a gentleman. He was ordinary, a gamekeeper’s son, no better than Tellman himself and hundreds of others in the police force like them. But as they had worked together an unadmitted loyalty had grown, and to betray that would be outside Tellman’s sense of decency. He would not be able to live with himself, and Gracie knew that.

“Where do we begin?” she said again. “If ’e done it, then ’e done it for a reason. Less’n yer daft, yer don’t up and kill someone without a reason so good it’s like a mountain yer can’t get ’round no other way.”

“I know.” He stood in the middle of the footpath, deep in thought as carriages and wagons streamed past down Bow Street, and people were obliged to step into the gutter to get around them. “We did everything at the time to find out why. Nobody knew of anything that even looked like a quarrel.” He shook his head. “There was no money, no women, no rivalry in business or sports or anything else. They even agreed about politics.”

“Well, we in’t looked ’ard enough!” She stood squarely in front of him. “What would Mr. Pitt do if ’e were ’ere?”

“What he did anyway,” he replied. “He looked at everything they had in common to see what they could possibly have quarreled over. We spoke to all their friends, acquaintances, everybody. Searched the house, read all his papers. There was nothing.”

She stood in the bright sun, chewing her lip, staring up at him. She looked like a tired and angry child on the brink of tears. She was still far too thin, and had to take up most of her clothes at the hem or she would have fallen over them.

“Yer don’ kill anyone fer nuffink,” she repeated stubbornly. “An’ ’e did it sudden, so it were summink ’as ’appened just ’afore ’e were killed. Yer gotta find out wot ’appened every day fer a week up until then. There’s summink there!” She would not bring herself to say please.

He hesitated, not out of unwillingness, but simply because he could think of nothing useful to be done.