in twos and threes. Laborers would be finishing soon, going home to the piled tenements, each having their own narrow little place where their own people were, their own few belongings.
He crossed the street and only just avoided being struck by a hansom. It was getting dark, and considerably colder.
He turned his coat collar up and increased his pace without being aware of it. He did not intend to get there any faster; he was drawn by emotion, an anger and urgency within.
He was going straight down the Mile End Road, which would become the Whitechapel Road as it crossed Brady Street. From reluctance he had changed to wanting to get it over with as quickly as possible. He was striding along, barely seeing people on either side. The streetlamps were lit. Orange lights were brilliant through the gathering darkness, carriages mere looming shapes with riding lamps on either side, horses’ hooves clattering on the wet stones, wheels hissing.
He turned left down Plumbers Row, which led into Coke Street. It was the one time and place he was almost sure of finding Jago Jones, and he had a deep, perhaps irrational belief that Jago would not lie to him if he was faced with the truth.
He swung around the last corner and saw the cart under the gas lamp, the light shining on its handles, polished smooth where hands had gripped it day after day perhaps for generations. Jago Jones’s lean figure in his shabby clothes was still serving hot soup to the last ragged figures. Beside him, working in silent unison, was Tallulah FitzJames.
Pitt watched, leaning against the wall in the shadows, until they were finished and turned to start putting it all away. There was nothing left; there never was.
“Reverend Jones.” Pitt moved forward and spoke softly.
Jago looked up. He was no longer surprised to see Pitt. He had been here too often over the last weeks and months.
“Yes, Superintendent?” he said patiently.
“I’m sorry.” Pitt meant it. Seldom had he regretted any necessity so much. “I cannot let the matter rest.” He glanced at Tallulah, still tidying and packing away.
“What is it now?” Jago asked, his brow furrowed with puzzlement. “I don’t know anything else. I have spoken to Ella Baker once or twice, but she was a very self-sufficient woman. She had no need of my counsel.” He smiled ruefully. “At least, shall I say, she had no desire for it. I did not know her well enough to be aware of her agony. Perhaps that is my shortcoming, but at least for her, it is too late now.”
His face in the lamplight showed nothing but sorrow and a sense of defeat. He moved farther away so Tallulah could not overhear them. “Please don’t ask me to question her, Superintendent. Even if she could speak to me, whatever she said would be between her and God. All I could offer would be some shred of human comfort, and the promise that God is sometimes a kinder judge than we expect, if we are honest. And I think too, perhaps, harsher, if we are not.”
“Honest, Reverend?” Pitt heard the catch in his own voice.
Jago stared at him. Perhaps he heard more of the irony, some deeper understanding, and pain than before. He half turned towards Tallulah, then changed his mind, or perhaps his belief in what he could accomplish.
“What is it, Superintendent? You say the word as if it had some greater meaning for you.”
Pitt had not expected Tallulah to be there. His first instinct had been to have her leave, to face Jago with his knowledge alone. It was a matter of decency, not to confront the man before someone who obviously had the utmost respect for him. Now he realized Tallulah would have to know. It concerned her too closely. Finlay was her brother. Whatever was said here in the dark and the damp of Coke Street would eventually be just as devastating in the withdrawing room of Devonshire Street. The delay would not save her from misery.
“It does, when spoken between the two of us regarding the deaths of Ada McKinley and Nora Gough,” Pitt answered his question.
Jago’s eyes were unwaveringly steady.
“I know nothing about them, Superintendent.”
Tallulah had finished the packing away and moved closer.
“What about Mary Smith?” Pitt asked, and neither did he flinch. “Off Globe Road, in Mile End, about six years ago. Are you going-” He stopped. Jago’s face was ashen. Even in the yellow-white glare of the gas lamp he looked like a death’s-head. There was no point in finishing the sentence. Jago was not going to lie. A lie would have been grotesque now, an indignity beyond redeeming.
“You were there,” Pitt said quietly, trying to ignore Tallulah’s eyes, staring at him with dawning horror. “You, Thirlstone, Helliwell, and Finlay FitzJames.” He did not make it a question, and his voice left no room for doubt.
Jago closed his eyes very slowly. He was controlling himself with a supreme effort. He looked as if he might fall if for an instant he let go.
“I will answer for myself, Superintendent, but for no one else.” He swallowed hard. His clenched hands shook. “Yes, I was there. In my younger days I did many things of which I am ashamed, but none as much as that. I drank too much, I wasted my time and valued things which were of no worth. I cared what people thought of me, not for love. Not respect or honor.” He said the words bitterly. “Not whether I hurt people. Not whether my example was good or bad, only to posture and parade, wanting to be smarter and wittier than the next man.”
Tallulah was still staring at him, but he seemed oblivious of her, drenched in loathing of the man he had been. She moved a step closer, but still he was unaware.
“Globe Road,” Pitt said, bringing him back to the issue, not only because it was what mattered to him but because Jago’s other sins, whatever they had been, were not his to judge, nor did he wish to know them.
“I was there,” Jago admitted again. “I did not kill Mary Smith.” His voice sank to a whisper, hoarse, as if the memory of it were still before his eyes. “But I know what was done to her, God forgive me. I have spent the rest of my life since then trying to repay-”
“Who killed her?” Pitt said gently. He believed it was not Jago, not only because he wanted to, but there was a passion in his face, a torture of guilt and memory, a self-disgust, but also a courage that he had at last spoken the truth and at the same time kept his own kind of honor.
“I will not tell you, Superintendent. I’m sorry.”
Pitt hesitated only a moment. There was no real decision to make.
“Reverend …” He used the title intentionally. “Mary Smith was not only killed, she was tortured first and humiliated. She was tied to her own bed, with her stocking, intimate garments …” He saw the naked pain in Jago’s face, but he did not stop. “She was terrified and hurt. Her fingers and toes were either wrenched out of their joints or the bones were broken. She wasn’t a practiced whore!” He heard his own voice grating hard. “She was a young girl, just started-”
“Superintendent!” The cry was wrung from Tallulah. She stepped forward and was standing beside Jago, staring at Pitt. “You don’t need to go on. We know what happened to the girls in Whitechapel. We accept that Mary Smith was the same, and that it was very terrible. Nobody, no living creature, should be treated that way, and you must find out who did it, and they must be punished-”
“Tallulah!” Jago gasped, trying to push her away. His face was streaked in the damp of the evening, or in the sweat of inner pain. “You don’t …” He stopped, unable to go on. “You …” He drew in a long, shuddering breath, then turned to Pitt. “Superintendent, I understand what you are saying, and I know even better than you do just how … how fearful it was. I admit my part in it. I was there, and I helped conceal what was done. For that I am guilty. But I will not say more than that.
“I have done all I can in the years since then to become a man worthy of forgiveness. I began from my own sense of remorse. Now I do it for the love of the task itself. Someone has to care for these people, and my reward in it has been greater than any bound or measure. But I understand that I was an accessory after the fact in a murder, and an accomplice in concealing the truth. There is always a price. May I please take the cart back to the kitchen before I come with you? They will need it tomorrow. Someone will take over what I cannot.”
“I will,” Tallulah said immediately. “Billy Shaw will help me, if I ask him, and Mrs. Moss.”
“Thank you.” Jago acknowledged this without looking at her.
“I am not taking you, Reverend,” Pitt said slowly. “I don’t believe you murdered Mary Smith, and I know you didn’t murder either of the two women here at Whitechapel.”
Jago stood without moving, confused. Still, he could not bring himself to look at Tallulah. He kept his head
