Pentecost Alley

by Anne Perry

  Pitt and Charlotte walked slowly side by side, indistinguishable from a hundred other couples enjoying one of the last really warm days of the year. The children ran around, laughing and chasing each other, largely pointlessly, simply because they had energy and it was fun. Daniel found a stick and threw it for a puppy that was dancing around them, apparently lost by its owner, at least for the time being. The dog ran for it and brought it back triumphantly. Jemima seized the stick and took a turn, hurling it as far as she could.

  Over in the distance near the road a barrel organ was playing a popular tune. A running patterer abandoned the news and sat on the grass eating a sandwich he had just bought from a peddler a hundred yards farther along. An old man sucked on a pipe, his eyes closed. Two housemaids on their day off told each other tall stories and giggled. A lawyer’s clerk lay under a tree and read a “penny dreadful” magazine.

  Charlotte took Pitt’s arm and walked a little closer. He shortened his step so she could keep pace with him.

  It was several minutes before Pitt recognized in the distance, striding across the grass, the upright, military figure of John Cornwallis making his way purposefully between the strollers. When he was within twenty yards the expression on his face made Charlotte stop and turn anxiously to Pitt.

  Pitt felt a chill run through him, but knew of no reason why he should be afraid.

  Cornwallis reached them.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Pitt,” he apologized to Charlotte, then looked at Pitt, his face pale and tight. “I’m afraid I must interrupt your Sunday afternoon.” He obviously intended it to be the cue for Charlotte to excuse herself and leave them alone, withdraw to a discreet distance, out of earshot.

  She did not do so, but instead held more tightly to Pitt’s arm, her fingers curling around and gripping.

  “Is it a matter of confidence of state?” Pitt enquired.

  “Dear God, I wish it were!” Cornwallis said with passion. “I am afraid by tomorrow everyone else in London will know.”

  “Know what?” Charlotte whispered.

  Cornwallis hesitated, looking at Pitt with concern. He wanted to protect Charlotte. He was unused to women. Pitt guessed he was acquainted with them only at a distance. He did not know other than convention taught him to expect.

  “Know what?” Pitt repeated.

  “Another prostitute has been murdered,” Cornwallis said huskily. “Exactly like the first … in every particular.”

  Pitt was stunned. It was as if suddenly he had lost his balance, and the grass and trees and sky dissolved and shifted around him.

  “In a tenement on Myrdle Street,” Cornwallis finished. “In Whitechapel. I think you had better go there, immediately. Ewart is on the scene. I shall find Mrs. Pitt a hansom to take her home.” His face was ashen. “I’m so sorry.”

  8

  PITT STOOD in the doorway of the room where the body had been found. Ewart, gray-faced, was already there. From down the corridor came the sound of hysterical weeping, shock and terror still in the rising, desperate tones, long drawn out as a woman lost control.

  Pitt met Ewart’s eyes and saw in them reflection of the horror he felt himself, and the sudden knowledge of guilt. He looked away.

  On the bed lay a young woman, small, almost like a child. Her hair spilled out around her, one arm flung over her head, her wrist tied With a stocking to the left corner bedpost. There was a garter with a blue ribbon around her arm. Her yellow-and-orange dress was drawn up, exposing her thighs. Her legs were naked. Like Ada McKinley, there was a stocking knotted tightly around her throat. Her face was purple, mottled and swollen. And like Ada, the top half of her body and the bed around it was soaked with water.

  With knowledge sick in his stomach, Pitt looked down at the floor. Her boots, black and polished, were buttoned to each other.

  He lifted his eyes and met Ewart’s.

  The weeping along the corridor was calmer, the fear subsiding into the long, broken sobs of grief.

  Ewart looked like a man who awoke from a nightmare only to find the same events playing themselves out in reality, from which there is no more awakening. There was a muscle twitching in his temple, and he clenched his hands to keep them from shaking.

  “Are her fingers and toes broken?” Pitt found his voice creaking, his throat was tight, his mouth dry.

  Ewart swallowed. He nodded imperceptibly, not trusting himself to speak.

  “Any … other evidence?” Pitt asked.

  Ewart took a deep breath, his eyes on Pitt’s, wide, filled with knowledge of what they both dreaded.

  “I … I haven’t looked.” His voice shook. “I sent for you straightaway. As soon as Lennox told me it was the same, I … I just left it. I …” He took another breath. “I went outside. I felt sick. If there’s anything here, I want you to be the one to find it, not me. At least … not me alone. I …” Again his eyes searched Pitt’s. There was a sheen of sweat on his upper lip and on his brow. “I did look around a bit. I didn’t see anything. But I haven’t searched, not properly, not combed it, down the backs of chairs, under the bed.”

  The unasked questions hung in the air between them, the consuming fear and guilt that they had made an appalling, irretrievable mistake, and Costigan had not killed Ada, and whoever had had struck again, here in this room. Was it Finlay FitzJames? Or Jago Jones? Or someone else they had not even thought of, out there in the darkness of the October streets, waiting to strike again, and again … like the madman who had called himself Jack the Ripper two years ago.

  Pitt turned and looked at the girl on the bed. She had thick, dark hair, naturally curly. She was small-boned, almost delicate. Her skin was very white, unblemished over her shoulders where the top of her dress was low cut, creamy white on the flesh of her thighs. She must have been young, seventeen or eighteen.

  “Who was she?” Pitt asked, surprised at the catch in his voice.

  “Nora Gough,” Ewart replied from just behind him. “Don’t know much about her yet. Can’t get any sense out of the other women here. All hysterical. Lennox is trying to calm them down now. Poor devil. But I suppose that’s what doctors are for. He was just along the street, half a mile away. Been there all evening with a patient.” He sniffed. “At least he’s not too late to help them, for what it’s worth.”

  They could both still hear the sobbing from the room along the passage, but it was muted now, the high note of hysteria gone from it. Better to let Lennox go on doing what he could than to go now and try to gain evidence from women too terrified to make any sense.

  “Then we’d better look through this room,” Pitt said wearily. It was a job he hated, and it was unlikely to provide anything he wanted to know. In fact, he dreaded what he might find. The one man who could not possibly be guilty was Costigan.

  “I’ll start with the bed,” he said to Ewart. “You start over there with the cupboard and the box chest. Anything unusual, anything at all. Any letters, papers, anything that might not have belonged to her, borrowed or stolen. Anything expensive.”

  Ewart did not move. Pitt wondered for a moment if he was so drowned by his horror he was incapable of functioning. His skin was bleached of color, as if he were already dead, a sort of waxen look.

  “Ewart,” he said more gently. “Start with the box chest.” At least that way he could keep his back to the body.

  “No … I’ll … I’ll do the bed,” Ewart replied, not quite meeting his eyes. “It’s … my job. I’m … all right.” His voice was thick, fighting so many emotions he seemed torn apart by them, sharp and high among them a white-hot anger.

  “Begin with the box chest,” Pitt repeated. “I’ll do the bed and the chairs.”

  Ewart still remained motionless. He seemed to want to speak, and yet he was unable to find the words, or perhaps to make the decision to say whatever it was. He looked like a man facing despair.

  They stood a few feet away from each other in the quiet room, the girl’s body almost within arm’s length. The
air was stale, closed in. Dusty light coming in through the window showed the bare places on the rug.

  Out in the street an old-clothes seller was shouting.

  “Do you know something about the death of Ada McKinley that you haven’t told me?” Pitt asked, hating doing it.

  Ewart’s eyes widened a little. “No.”

  Pitt believed him. Whatever he had been fearing, it was not that question; his surprise was too genuine.

  “Are you afraid Costigan was the wrong man?”

  “Aren’t you?” Ewart asked.

  “Yes, of course I am. Who was it? Finlay FitzJames?” Ewart winced. “No …” he said quickly, too quickly for thought.

  Pitt turned away and began to search the bed. Lennox had already examined the body. It did not matter if he disturbed her now. It was irrational to be gentle but it came automatically, as if somehow the shell that was left was still a human being, capable of knowing pity or dignity.

  He found a handkerchief under the pillow on the farther side, white, like the sheet, and to begin with he thought it was merely the corner of a slip a little crookedly on. Then he pulled and it came away. It was of fine lawn, the hand-stitched hem rolled to a tiny edge, embroidered with letters in one corner. The writing was Gothic, hard to decipher at first glance. Pitt made it out. “F.F.J.” He had almost known it would be, but it still gave him a lurching sensation high in his stomach and a tightening in his throat.

  He looked across at Ewart, but he had his back turned, going through the contents of the chest, linen and clothes piled on the floor beside him. He was apparently unaware that Pitt had stopped.

  “I’ve found a handkerchief,” Pitt said in the silence.

  Ewart turned slowly, his face expectant. He met Pitt’s eyes and saw in them what he dreaded.

  “Initials,” Pitt said, answering the question that had not been asked. “F.F.J.”

  “That’s … that’s ridiculous!” Ewart said, stumbling over his tongue. “Why on earth would he leave a handkerchief behind? Who leaves a handkerchief in a prostitute’s bed? He didn’t live here!”

  “I suppose someone who had occasion to blow his nose while he was with her,” Pitt replied. “A man with a cold, or whom something caused to sneeze. Dust, perhaps, or her perfume?”

  “And he put it under the pillow?” Ewart said, still fighting against it.

  “Well, he wouldn’t have a pocket conveniently,” Pitt rejoined. “Anyway, it is not ours to reason why at the moment. Keep on looking. There may be something else.”

  “What? Are you saying he left something else here too?” Ewart’s voice rose, almost in panic. “He’d have nothing left if he went on leaving things around Whitechapel at this rate.”

  “Not something belonging to Finlay FitzJames,” Pitt said as calmly as he could. “Anything else at all. Perhaps something to indicate another man. We’ve got to search the whole room.”

  “Oh. Yes, of course we have. Er …” Ewart turned back to the box chest without saying anything more and resumed taking the things out and opening them up, shaking them, running his fingers through them, then folding them and placing them on the pile beside him.

  Pitt finished searching the bed and moved on to the floor around it. He lit the candle on the table, then placed it in the shadows on the floor and knelt down to peer beneath. There was very little dust, a few threads of cotton, mostly white, and a boot button which he only found by running his fingers carefully over the surface of the floor, searching the cracks of the boards. There were also two hairpins and a straight pin such as dressmakers use. Towards the foot of the bed he found a piece of bootlace, a button such as might come off any man’s white cotton shirt, and another button, leather, handmade, unlikely to belong to anyone in Whitechapel unless he had been given a man’s casual coat from some charity collection.

  He straightened up with them in his hand.

  Ewart had finished the box chest and was looking through the small dresser, his hands searching quickly, expertly.

  Pitt began on the chairs, lifting up the cushions, exploring down the back and sides and finally turning them upside down and examining the bottoms. He found nothing more to which he could connect any meaning.

  “Anything?” Ewart asked him.

  Pitt held out the buttons.

  “Shirt,” Ewart said to the first. “Could belong to anyone at all. And it could have been there for months.” He took the second, rolled it between his fingers and thumb, then looked up and met Pitt’s eyes. “Quality,” he said dubiously. “But again, could be anybody’s. Could be a tramp in a charity coat.” There was a challenge in his voice, daring Pitt to say it was FitzJames’s. “Are you going to see the women here? They seem to be in control of themselves now.”

  Indeed it was considerably quieter. The light had almost gone and there was no sound from the bottle factory over the road. A horse and trap went by. Someone shouted.

  “Yes,” Pitt replied. “We’ll see what they know.”

  He led the way along the passage to the kitchen at the back of the house. It was surprisingly large with a black stove in the center of the far wall and a grimy window facing straight onto the backs of houses in the next street. There was a table with odd legs in the center, patched together from two previous pieces of furniture, and half a dozen assorted chairs. Four of them were now occupied by women ranging in age from approximately twenty to over fifty, although with age, drink and paint, it was impossible to be sure. They all looked tragic and absurd, with powder and rouge streaked by tears, hair falling out of pins, eyes swollen with weeping. And at the same time they looked younger, and more human and individual with the shell of business cracked away.

  Lennox was standing half behind one of the women, one hand on her shoulder, a cup of tea in the other, holding it out for her. He looked pale and tired, his nose accentuated by the deep lines scored down the sides of his mouth. He stared at Pitt warningly. His voice was hoarse when he spoke.

  “Good evening, Superintendent. If you want to question these women, they are ready to answer you. Just don’t tell them details you don’t have to, and be a little patient. It isn’t easy to remember, or to find words, when you are terrified.”

  Pitt nodded and turned to Ewart. “You could try the neighborhood. See if anyone else has noticed anything unusual, if they can remember a face, someone coming or going at about …?” He looked at Lennox enquiringly.

  “Between four and five,” Lennox answered, then smiled in bitter mockery of himself. “Not medical brilliance, Superintendent. Observation of witnesses. Pearl heard Nora calling out in the corridor at about four o’clock. She’d just got up and was asking Edie if she could borrow a petticoat.”

  Pitt looked at the women Lennox indicated. Pearl was pale-faced with flaxen hair of extraordinary beauty, sheer as spun glass and reflecting the light of the candles like wheatsilk, a patch of luminosity in the room. Edie was heavy and dark with olive skin and handsome, liquid brown eyes.

  “And you lent her a petticoat?” Pitt asked.

  Edie nodded. “She ’ad ter pin it, as she in’t ’alf my size, but she took it any’ow.” She sniffed and controlled herself with an effort.

  “And the other time?” Pitt asked Lennox.

  Lennox turned to another woman, dark, narrow-eyed, with a pretty mouth. She looked ashen, the rouge standing out on her cheeks, her hair lopsided where she had run her fingers through it, pins sliding out.

  “Mabel can answer that.”

  “Me first customer’d just gorn,” Mabel replied, her voice hardly more than a whisper. “I were goin’ past Nora’s door an’ I looked in. Dunno ’ow I knew she were by ’erself. Quiet, I s’pose.” She frowned, as though the puzzle mattered. “I saw ’er lyin’ on the bed wif ’er ’and up ter the post. I reckoned as ’er customer’d bin keen on that kind o’ thing, an’ left ’er like that. I even said summink to ’er….” She sniffed and swallowed with a painful constriction of her throat. Her body was shaking so uncontrollabl
y her fingers skittered on the table.

  Lennox moved across behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, holding her against him as if to give her of his own strength. It was a gesture of extraordinary gentleness. She might have been a friend of long standing, not a street woman he had only just met.

  It steadied her, like a ray of sanity in the chaos.

  “Then I saw ’er face,” she said quietly. “An’ I know as it ’ad ’appened to ’er too. The same one as got Ada McKinley’d got ’er too. I s’pose I must ’a’ yelled. Next thing everyone were there, an’ all yellin’ an’ callin’ out.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Pitt turned to Ewart. “You’d better find out what men were seen coming or going from this building between four and five. Get descriptions of all of them and compare them with each woman and her customers. Get times as near as you can. Any man at all. I don’t care if they’re residents, pimps, or the lamplighter! Everyone.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Ewart departed and Pitt concentrated on the four women present. The last one, Kate, was still sobbing, pushing a wet handkerchief into her mouth and gasping for breath. Lennox went back to the stove and made another cup of tea, passing it to her, closing her stiff fingers around it awkwardly as Pitt began questioning Pearl, sitting on a rickety chair at right angles over the table from her.

  “Tell me all you can remember from just before you saw Nora at almost four o’clock,” he prompted.

  She stared at him, then began hesitantly.

  “I ’eard Nora come inter ’er room an’ call ter Edie abaht a petticoat, but I din’ ’ear wot Edie said. I were busy doin’ me ’air ready fer the evenin’. I finished, and went aht. I got a customer real quick, one o’ me reg’lars….”