Lily Wallace stood in the doorway of the narrow terraced house in Nelson Place, a sleeping baby in her arms and a little girl of about two hanging onto her skirt. The little girl looked up at Inspector Feather and the uniformed police constable with undisguised curiosity, her mouth open in wonder. Perhaps she’d never seen a police constable up close before. The police in Whitechapel tended to keep away from narrow streets and lanes unless there was a call for help or an alarm raised.
Lily Wallace shook her head. ‘No, Joe ain’t here.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘At work, I expect.’
‘He’s not at Ramsden’s or at Higgins’,’ Feather told her.
She shrugged. ‘I expect he’s gone somewhere else, then. Joe works casual. Different places, different people. There’s loads of butchers in this part of London. Everyone wants meat.’
Feather nodded.
‘Thank you, Mrs Wallace. Will you tell Joe I called looking for him?’
‘What’s it about?’ she asked.
‘Just a few questions,’ said Feather blandly. ‘We’re interested in someone Joe might know.’
‘Who?’
‘I’m afraid we can’t say at the moment, but hopefully Joe will be able to help us. I’ve left my card at Higgins in Cable Street for him.’
He doffed his hat, then he and the constable walked off.
Lily Wallace shut the door then walked through the house and out into the backyard and the outside toilet. She banged on the wooden door.
‘It’s all right, Joe,’ she said. ‘They’ve gone.’
She heard the bolt inside being drawn back, then the door opened and Joe Wallace peered out nervously.
‘What did they want?’
‘They didn’t say. Just said they wanted to talk to you about some bloke you might know.’
Wallace gave a sarcastic laugh and stepped out of the outhouse. ‘Yeh, right!’
‘He was from Scotland Yard. Called himself Inspector Feather. Said he’d left his card for you at Higgins.’ She looked at him suspiciously. ‘What’s going on, Joe?’
‘Nothing, Lil. It’s all a mistake. Someone’s been spreading lies about me.’
‘About what?’
‘About nothing.’
‘It ain’t nothing if the police are calling!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m going to get this sorted out.’
‘How?’
‘There’s a bloke I know. He’ll sort it out for me. I’ll go and see him.’
‘Where?’
‘Up west.’
‘Is this that rich bloke who keeps coming round?’
‘What rich bloke?’ asked Wallace uncomfortably.
‘Oh, come on, Joe! I’m not an idiot. Twice now you’ve said you had some private work to do, and both times this carriage pulls up at the end of the street. Don’t think I haven’t seen it.’
‘Have you been spying on me?’
‘I’ve got a right to know what you’re up to when you go off like that. After the first time I wondered if it might be some fancy woman.’
‘Don’t be daft. And I bought money back with me, didn’t I?’
‘Yeh, but I wondered what for.’
‘Lil, how can you think that about me? It was a butchery job. A private one. This bloke wanted some meat cut up in a special way at his place.’ He looked at her suspiciously. ‘How did you know it was a rich bloke?’
‘With that carriage?’
‘Yeh, but how did you know it was a bloke?’
‘Like I said, in case you were up to something with some woman, I went after you when it happened again the second night, and I heard his voice when you opened the door of the carriage.’
Wallace shook his head. ‘I never thought you’d do something like that, Lil. Follow me. It means you don’t trust me. You never follow me when I do a night shift at Ramsden’s.’
‘That’s different, I know Karl Ramsden. Who is he, this bloke?’
‘It’s secret, Lil. Private work. He’s … eccentric.’ He looked at her, worried. ‘You sure they’ve gone?’
‘Yeh.’
‘Still, just in case they’re watching the house, I’ll go over the back wall. Go and get my coat for me, just in case they’re looking in through the windows.’
Lily regarded him, uncertain.
‘You’re really sure there’s nothing going on?’
‘Nothing, Lil! On my word! I swear! I’ll be back as soon as I’ve got this sorted.’
She hesitated, then turned and headed back towards the house, the little girl still clinging to her skirt.
Daniel was scowling as they left the Abberlines’ house. ‘I am such an idiot,’ he castigated himself. ‘I should have thought of that! About other possible victims.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Abigail. ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you in front of your old boss.’
‘You didn’t embarrass me. I embarrassed me.’
‘I should have said something to you first,’ said Abigail apologetically. ‘It was just the idea popped into my head and I just said it.’
‘And I’m glad you did, otherwise Fred wouldn’t have lent us his notebooks.’ He patted his pockets where he’d put them. ‘When we get home, we’ll compare his with mine and fill in any blanks.’
Abigail suddenly came to a halt and held Daniel’s arm. ‘I have a suggestion,’ she said.
Daniel looked at her, intrigued.
‘You obviously have a great deal of respect for Fred Abberline, and he for you. You obviously worked well together in the past. How do you feel about bringing him into our investigation?’
Daniel stared at her, stunned.
‘Working with us?’
‘Why not? We work with John Feather.’
‘Yes, but …’ Daniel faltered.
‘We can ask Ellen Sickert if she’ll agree to add Mr Abberline to our team. If she doesn’t agree, we’ll hire him and pay him part of our fee.’
As Daniel frowned, thinking this over, Abigail added: ‘You’ve said yourself, Whitechapel is at the heart of this. Fred Abberline was an inspector there for nine years, and right at the centre of the Ripper investigation. You believe these murders are linked right back to those original deaths. What better man to work with us on this than the one who led that original investigation?’
Slowly, hesitantly, Daniel nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. He turned and headed back towards Abberline’s house.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Abigail.
‘To ask Fred if he’ll join us.’
‘But we haven’t got approval from Ellen Sickert yet,’ Abigail pointed out. ‘It was only a suggestion.’
‘And an excellent one. And, as you’ve suggested, if she says no, we’ll pay him from our fee.’ He grinned. ‘This is like the Ripper investigation all over again.’
Abberline looked at them in surprise when he opened the door to their knock.
‘I thought you’d gone.’
‘We had,’ said Daniel. ‘But we’ve got an offer to make you. Would you work with us on this case? Paid, of course.’
‘Paid?’
‘In your role as a consulting detective.’ Daniel grinned. ‘If you’re good enough for Pinkertons, you’re good enough for us.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Abberline doubtfully. ‘You weren’t always enamoured of me when I was your boss, Daniel. Sometimes I knew you thought I pushed too hard.’
‘I was young and learning,’ said Daniel. ‘And you wouldn’t be the boss in this case.’
‘No, I’m aware of that,’ said Abberline. He suddenly smiled and nodded towards Abigail. ‘She is. And yes, count me in.’
‘Thank you,’ said Abigail.
‘I think the next move will be for you to come to the National Gallery and meet Stanford Beckett,’ said Daniel. ‘He’s the curator there.’
‘And he’s the one paying for your investigation?’
Daniel hesitated, then said: ‘No. That’s Walter Sickert.’
‘Sickert?’
‘To be exact, Ellen Sickert, his wife, is the one who’s paying for everything.’
‘I can’t see her agreeing to my joining you,’ said Abberline doubtfully. ‘She was quite angry when she realised we were questioning Sickert. In fact, very angry.’
‘But she’s hired us, and I was your sergeant at that time,’ Daniel pointed out. ‘We’re fairly confident she’ll agree.’
‘And if she doesn’t, we’ll pay you from our fee,’ said Abigail. She smiled. ‘We’ll simply increase our charge.’ Then she became serious as she added: ‘She is very determined to have Walter proved innocent of these crimes, which means discovering the real culprit.’
‘Very well,’ said Abberline. ‘If you’re sure.’
‘We’re sure,’ said Abigail. ‘And she will be, too.’
‘So, when can you be free to meet Mr Beckett?’
‘The sooner the better,’ said Abberline.
‘How about tomorrow? Will one o’clock tomorrow afternoon be all right for you?’
‘Make it two,’ said Abberline. ‘Emma likes us to sit down for lunch at twelve.’
‘Two o’clock it is,’ said Abigail. ‘We can show you where the bodies were dumped.’
‘And tonight we’ll go through your old notebooks and see if there’s anything we need to ask you about them,’ added Daniel.
‘You think it’s this butcher?’ asked Abberline.
‘I do,’ said Daniel.
‘Where does this rich bloke, Kate Branson’s toff, fit in?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Daniel admitted. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact this butcher is in the frame, the toff would certainly have been a candidate. He’s got a carriage in which he could move the bodies. But so, I assume, has this butcher. When we were at Smithfield, all the butchers had vans to transport their meat.’
Sickert sat at a table in the small police station while a woman summoned from a local cafe bathed the cuts and bruises on his face with water from an enamel bowl. His yells and those from some local bystanders had brought the local gendarmes running from the station and they’d soon overpowered the three men, who were now locked in a cell. The sergeant in charge returned to Sickert after questioning them about the attack, and now he sat down at the table with the English painter.
‘The big one with the beard is called Charles Dresser,’ he told Sickert. ‘He is the uncle of Anne-Marie Dresser, who used to live here before she went to London. The other two men are shipmates with him. He works on a fishing boat. He’d been away at sea, and when he got back to shore, he read the paper that his niece had been killed in London. Murdered by the Ripper, it said. The New Ripper. The paper said that a Mr Walter Sickert had been arrested for her murder, which is why he was shocked to see you walking free here in Dieppe. All he could think of was that you had escaped and fled England.
‘Unfortunately, the more he thought about it, the more he drank, and the more he drank, the angrier he became.’
‘I didn’t kill her,’ said Sickert. ‘The police in England let me go because they had evidence that I couldn’t have killed her.’
The sergeant nodded. ‘Yes, we found a later edition of a newspaper that said that. We’ve told Charles Dresser and that he made a mistake. So I ask you now, do you wish to press charges against these men?’
Sickert weighed up the question. He was still not convinced that the men were innocent, but the sergeant and other officers at the station had assured him that they knew the men, that they were genuine fishermen.
‘Did they have weapons on them?’ he asked. ‘Knives?’
‘No,’ said the sergeant. ‘Which is unusual for fishermen, but M’sieur Dresser and Jerome, one of his comrades, had both got in trouble before for getting into a fight when they were drunk and producing their knives. So they had decided that thereafter they would always leave their knives at home so nothing like that could happen again.’
‘Very well,’ said Sickert. ‘In that case, I don’t wish to press charges against them. But warn them that if they come after me again, I will. And, again, do repeat to them that I did not kill Anne-Marie. I am completely innocent of her death.’
Pulver Street had terraced houses on both sides of the street, their red brick and roofs stained with dark smoke smudges from the railway line that backed on to it. A woman in her late fifties looked out anxiously when she opened the door to Daniel’s knock.
‘Mrs Watts?’ asked Daniel. When the woman nodded, he said: ‘We’re here about your daughter, Catherine.’
‘You’ve got news of her?’ asked the woman, suddenly eager. She turned and called into the house: ‘Charlie! There’s people here with news of our Cath!’
‘Actually, I’m afraid …’ began Daniel apologetically, but before he could finish a man in shirtsleeves and braces appeared from a nearby room, his face showing the same eagerness as that on his wife’s.
‘You’ve got news of Cath?’ he burst out excitedly. Then, when he saw the awkward looks on their faces, his whole manner changed: he stumbled back and fell against the wall of the passage. ‘It’s not … ?’ he stammered.
‘No,’ said Daniel quickly. ‘It’s not bad news. In fact, we have no news of her at all. We came here in the hope you might have.’
‘Who are you?’ demanded Watts, and he glared at them aggressively.
‘We’re private enquiry agents,’ said Abigail. ‘My name’s Abigail Fenton and this is Mr Daniel Wilson, formerly a detective sergeant with the Metropolitan Police. We’ve been hired by Mr Walter Sickert, an artist, to ascertain the whereabouts of Mrs Catherine Heppenstall, which we understand is her married name.’
‘Who’s this Sickert?’ demanded Watts.
‘I remember now,’ said Mrs Watts. ‘Catherine wrote to us about a year ago and said he was painting her portrait. She was very proud. She said he painted all the great ladies. All the top people.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Abigail.
‘Why’s he want to know where she is after all this time?’ demanded Mr Watts, suspiciously.
‘We’re not sure,’ lied Abigail. ‘He just hired us to find her. We assume it’s something to do with the portrait.’
‘Did he finish it?’ asked Mrs Watts.
‘We’re not sure,’ Daniel told her. ‘And I’m afraid we can’t get hold of Mr Sickert to ask him at the moment. He’s in Venice.’
‘Venice?’ frowned Watts. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Italy,’ said Abigail. ‘He’s gone there to paint.’
Watts and his wife exchanged puzzled looks, then Mrs Watts said to her husband in appeal: ‘Let’s talk to them, Charlie. They might know something.’
Still looking cross, Charlie Watts gave a reluctant nod. ‘You’d better come in,’ he said. He looked at his wife. ‘Take ’em into the parlour, Edie. I’ll put on my jacket and join you.’
Daniel and Abigail followed Mrs Watts along the narrow passage to the parlour. It was a small room, one that looked as if it wasn’t used often with its highly polished dark brown furniture and immaculate floral-decorated armchairs. She gestured them to sit, then seated herself, and Charlie Watts appeared, now wearing a jacket.
‘We’re very sorry to trouble you,’ said Daniel. ‘We wondered if Catherine had been in touch with you recently?’
Watts shook his head.
‘We haven’t seen her for over two years,’ said Mrs Watts. ‘Not since she went up west. She moved there because she said she had more chance of getting better singing jobs at the top places in London. We used to get letters from her when she was first there, telling us how she was doing, and what places she was appearing at.’
‘She’s a singer,’ grunted Watts. ‘Good, too.’
‘Then one day we got a letter from her telling us she was married to this top doctor.’
‘A surgeon,’ Watts corrected her. ‘That’s more than a doctor.’
‘Edmund Heppenstall,’ said Mrs Watts. ‘She sent us a photo of the wedding.’ She gestured at the sideboard. ‘I keep it in the drawer to look after it. It’s the last one we had of her.’
‘May we see it?’ asked Abigail.
Mrs Watts got up and went to the sideboard and took a framed photograph from the drawer, which she handed to them. It showed a couple, he in top hat, frock coat and tails and she in a long white bridal dress, standing in a garden somewhere. Another couple were in the photograph, the man standing to attention next to Heppenstall, the woman next to Catherine.
‘You weren’t at the wedding?’ asked Abigail.
‘No,’ said Watts sourly. ‘We weren’t good enough.’
‘Charlie!’ his wife rebuked him. ‘That’s not right. She knew it would be hard for us to get up from Clapham.’
‘She’s ashamed of us,’ said Watts bitterly. ‘That’s why we weren’t invited.’ He looked aggressively at Daniel and Abigail. ‘I’m just a labourer. I work on the railway. She didn’t want the likes of me and Edie mixing with her new toff friends, embarrassing her.’
‘That’s not fair, Charlie,’ protested Mrs Watts.
‘No? Then why didn’t she write and let us know she was getting married before they did it? I’ll tell you why. She was worried we’d want to be invited, or we might even have just turned up.’
‘You said she wrote and told you she was having her portrait painted by Mr Sickert,’ said Abigail. ‘Did she write again after that, to tell you how it went?’
Both the Watts shook their heads. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That was the last we heard from her.’
‘I wrote to her after we hadn’t heard anything to ask her what was happening to the painting,’ said Watts. ‘But I never got a reply. Not a word. So I wrote again. And again, nothing. So I wrote again, saying this time that I’d be coming up west and I’d call on her.’ He looked shamefaced as he added: ‘I wasn’t really going to, but I wanted to provoke her into giving me the decency of a reply. Instead, I got a letter from that husband of hers, saying “I have to inform you that your daughter is no longer at this address, and I have no way of contacting her”.’ He scowled. ‘Bastard! He dumped her.’
‘Do you know that for certain?’ asked Daniel.
‘No, not for sure, but what other explanation is there? He obviously found himself someone else, someone posher than our Cath, someone more appropriate to his social standing.’
‘And you haven’t heard from Catherine since?’
‘No. Nothing.’ He hesitated, then said, very reluctantly: ‘I even went to their house to find out what had happened to her.’
‘He did,’ nodded Mrs Watts.
‘This butler opened the door and I told him I was Mrs Heppenstall’s father, and I wanted to know where she was. Heppenstall came to the door when the butler told him who I was and what I wanted. He stood there looking down his nose at me like I was something disgusting that had turned up on his doorstep and told me he had no idea where Catherine was and that he had no interest in knowing her whereabouts. He also told me in no uncertain terms that if I bothered him again, he’d have the police on me. And then he shut the door in my face.’
‘Charlie was so upset when he came back,’ said Mrs Watts.
‘I was,’ nodded Watts angrily. ‘To be treated like that, like I was the lowest of the low.’
‘Did you make any further enquiries about her?’ asked Abigail.
‘Who from?’ asked Watts. ‘We knew nothing about her life in that circle. We knew her address and the name of her husband, and the fact she was having her portrait painted by this artist bloke Sickert. There was no one to ask about her.’
‘You could have sought out Mr Sickert,’ suggested Abigail.
‘Where?’ asked Watts. ‘I had no idea where he lived. I’d never heard of him. The only person who might know where I could get hold of him was Catherine’s bastard of a husband, and he’d made it clear he wanted nothing to do with me.’
‘And you’re sure you haven’t heard from Catherine since?’ asked Daniel.
‘Nothing,’ said Watts sadly.
‘How did the announcement about Catherine’s wedding to Mr Heppenstall get into the local paper here in Clapham?’ asked Abigail.
‘That was Edie,’ said Watts. ‘She went in and told them.’
‘I wanted those people who looked down on Catherine to know how well she’d done, marrying a real toff in London, a top doctor.’
‘Surgeon,’ Watts corrected her again.
‘There were people here who said bad things about her, saying she was a low person because of the places she appeared in here in Clapham,’ said Mrs Watts. ‘It’s not easy for a singer who’s just starting out to get engagements, so she often used to appear in local pubs, many of them not the best of places. That’s the reason she went up west, to really get her career going at decent places. I wanted those people who said bad things about my girl to choke on their words when they saw that piece in the paper about who she was marrying.’