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.
How blind I was. He has denied the very existence of the loan, and I am finished. I shall lose the factories, and a thousand men will be out of work, and all those who depend upon them will perish likewise. It is my fault, for trusting a man not worthy of honor. I cannot live to see it happen; I cannot bear to watch it, or face the men I have destroyed.
I am taking the only course left to me. May God forgive me.
James Sissons
Beside it lay a note of debt for twenty thousand pounds, signed by the Prince of Wales. Pitt stared at them and they swam before his eyes. The room seemed to sway around him as if he were aboard a ship. He put his hands on the desk to steady himself. Sissons was beyond help. When the first clerk came in, when he was found, and the letter and note of debt with him, it would do more damage than half a dozen sticks of dynamite. An unrepaid loan to the Prince of Wales, for him to race horses, drink wine and give presents to his mistresses, while in Spitalfields fifteen hundred families went into beggary! Shops would close, tradesmen would go out of business, houses would be boarded up and people would live on the streets.
There would be riots that would make Bloody Sunday in Trafalgar Square look like a playground squabble. The whole of the East End of London would erupt.
And when Remus was given the last piece of evidence he needed to expose the Whitechapel murderer as in the service of the throne, no one would care whether the Queen or the Prince of Wales, or anyone else, had known of it or wished it; there would be revolution. The old order would be gone forever, replaced by rage, and then terror, and then unrelenting destruction, the good and the bad torn apart together.
Law would be the first to suffer, the law that oppressed and the law that protected equally, and finally all law, even that which governed conscience and the violence within.
He reached for the letter. If he tore it up, no one else would ever know. Then he noticed beside it a pattern of tiny platters of ink with a large clear space in the center. It was a moment before he realized what it was; then he picked up the inkwell and placed it very carefully over the unmarked patch. It fit exactly. The inkwell normally sat to the left of Sissons! Had it been moved to make him seem right-handed?
Carefully he took the dead man’s left hand and turned it over, gently touching the insides of the first and second fingers. He felt the ridge where Sissons normally held a pen. Why?
He had been shot in the right side of his head … and someone had realized too late that he was left- handed.
A murder made to look like suicide … but by whom? And who might lie and say Sissons was right-handed, or could use either hand?
He must make certain this was seen as the murder it was. If he got rid of the gun, dropped it in one of the sugar vats, there could be no denying it.
This half of the conspiracy could be stifled. Then even if Remus broke the other story, the rage here in Spitalfields would not erupt. There would be anger, but against Sissons, not against the throne.
Was that what he wanted? His hand stayed in the air, poised above the paper. If the Prince of Wales had borrowed money for his own extravagance and not repaid, even when it would bring ruin to thousands of people, then he deserved to be overthrown, stripped of his privileges and left as comparatively destitute as those in Spitalfields were now. Even if he became a fugitive, a refugee in another land, it was no worse than what happened to many. He would have to start again as a stranger, just as Isaac and Leah Karansky and tens of thousands like them had done. In the last analysis, all human life was equal.
What justice was there if Pitt concealed this monstrous selfishness, criminal irresponsibility, because the guilty man was the Prince of Wales? It made him party to the sin.
And if he did not, then countless people who had no say in it at all would be consumed by the violence which would follow, and the destruction which would leave poverty and waste behind it, perhaps for a generation.
His mind was in turmoil. Every belief he had lived by forbade he conceal the truth of the debt. Yet even as his thoughts raced, his hand closed over the paper. He crunched it up, then unfolded it and tore it across again and again until it was in tiny pieces. Not yet certain why, he put the note of debt far down inside his shirt, next to his body.
