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.
