Simon Anstis entered the reception area of University College Hospital. In his hand he held a bouquet of flowers, encased in decorated paper. Inside the bouquet was a long, thin-bladed and very sharp knife.
Wilson and Fenton, he thought vengefully. They are the ones who’ve destroyed everything for me. Everything would have worked perfectly if they hadn’t poked their noses in. Now, his life was in ruins. Well first he’d finish Wilson, and then he’d flee. Somewhere abroad. Change his name. Plenty of others had done it.
He walked up to the main reception and smiled at the woman behind the desk.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it will be possible for me to visit Mr Daniel Wilson, who’s a patient here. I’m an old friend of his.’
‘I’m afraid Mr Wilson is not receiving visitors,’ said the receptionist.
‘I understand. Would it be possible for me to leave these flowers for him? I’ve been told there’s a policeman on duty outside his room. I wondered if it would be all right for me to leave them with him.’
The receptionist looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’d need to check.’
Antis smiled at her again. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I quite understand. I’ll return another day.’
He walked away from the reception desk. Damn, he thought. This isn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped. Still, with just one policeman on duty outside his room, I can talk my way past him. A gentleman with upper-class manners and educated voice can go anywhere.
He went back to the double doors leading to the street, and – as he’d done before on his failed attempt to smother Wilson – he made for the stairs to the first floor where Wilson’s private room was situated. A solitary policeman was on duty outside the room.
‘Good morning, Officer,’ smiled Anstis. ‘The receptionist said I could come up here and leave these flowers for Mr Wilson on the chair beside his bed. I’m an old friend of his.’
The constable looked uncertain. ‘I need to get permission from the matron first,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ nodded Anstis genially. ‘I’ll wait here while you go and see her.’ As the constable looked like he was about to insist Anstis left and returned later, Anstis added: ‘That way, if anyone comes and wonders where you are, I can tell them. We don’t want you getting in trouble for deserting your post.’
The constable hesitated, then nodded. ‘I won’t be a moment,’ he said.
Anstis smiled and waited until the constable had disappeared round the corner. Then he took the knife from the bouquet, abandoned the flowers on the chair beside the door, pushed open the door and walked in.
Daniel Wilson lay in the bed, still unconscious, pale, barely breathing.
So, still alive, but not for much longer, thought Anstis vengefully.
He approached the bed, the knife held to one side ready to plunge it into Wilson’s heart. He pulled back his hand, and then heard a swishing sound behind him, and the next second pain of a level he’d never experienced before flooded through him as something crashed down on his wrist and he heard and felt the bones in his wrist break.
He screamed and spun round and saw the enraged features of Abigail Fenton, and then she swung the heavy police truncheon at him and his face exploded in blood and pain and everything went black.
Fred Abberline sat next to a wall at one side of the interview room in the basement of Scotland Yard. In the centre of the room Chief Superintendent Armstrong and Inspector Feather sat looking at the forlorn figure of Simon Anstis, whose damaged face was heavily bandaged and whose broken right arm was encased in plaster and in a sling.
Abigail was still at University College Hospital, watching over Daniel. Armstrong had generously invited Abberline to sit in and observe the questioning of Anstis. ‘That way, you can tell her what happened,’ Armstrong had grunted. ‘Save me doing it.’
Anstis didn’t need persuading to talk. Armstrong’s opening question ‘Why did you do it?’ had been like releasing a dam. All the hatred and anger and misery poured out from him.
‘It was about Sickert. I hated him. No – more than hated him. There isn’t a word to describe the depth of my feelings of anger and hatred towards him. It began when he mocked my work. He called me an “amateur dauber”, and a “would-be Sunday painter”. And he said it to others, abusing me to them behind my back so that people laughed at me and disparaged my work. Meanwhile, the critics heaped praise on Sickert’s work. The top people flocked to have their portraits painted by him. Some people bought my work, but very few, and then only to find favour with my father.
‘And then Sickert brought Anne-Marie back from France with him and installed her in a room. I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her. More than love, it was a passion like I’d never experienced before. She agreed to model for me, naked. The same as she did for Sickert. But whereas she allowed Sickert to have her completely, she kept me at arm’s length. She deliberately played with my feelings. I think she may have used my interest in her to titillate Sickert.
‘With that, and his mockery of me as an artist, I knew I had to get rid of him if I was ever going to find some kind of inner peace. But if I just killed him, or got someone else to do it for me, I knew it would just elevate his position as an artist. He would be seen as the great British artist who died too young. And Anne-Marie would mourn him instead of coming to me for comfort after his death. I had to do more than just have him killed, I had to discredit him. Disgrace him, so that the critics and the people would shun his work and Anne-Marie would recoil from him in disgust. But how?
‘And then I remembered that there had been rumours at the time of Jack the Ripper of Sickert having been part of a conspiracy that carried out the murders. As luck would have it, I was having a jacket made for me by a tailor’s in Bethnal Green, Barrowman’s. I went there because they’d made clothes for my father, and he said I could put it on his account there. While I was there, being measured, I got talking to the tailor’s apprentice and when he asked me what I did, I told him I was an artist. At that he became very sullen. I asked him what was the matter with artists, and he told me that his mother had had an encounter with one and she died as a result. I asked him where he came from, and when he told me Whitechapel, I realised that it was possible he was one of the children of a Ripper victim. So I brought up the name Sickert, and he went into a rage, saying that he was the man who’d killed his mother in conspiracy with the Queen’s doctor and her grandson, and how they’d got away with it because of who they were.’
‘This was Henry Nichols?’ asked Armstrong, checking the name on the notes he’d been given.
Anstis nodded. ‘He told me he wasn’t the only one who felt this way. He said there was a childhood friend of his whose mother had also died at the hands of this trio, but who’s death hadn’t even been attributed to the Ripper, so there was no chance of him trying to claim compensation. Not that any of them ever got compensation, but there were rumours that they might be able to. He said this friend of his, a butcher, was even angrier than him about the injustice of what had been done, and that no one had been tried. Not that there was much they could do about it: the Queen’s doctor was dead, and so was her grandson. The only one of the three still alive was Sickert, and he was untouchable because of all the famous and influential people he knew.
‘That’s when I had my idea: how I could discredit Sickert in the eyes of everyone, and have him executed as a filthy, loathsome murder. I got Nichols to introduce me to his butcher friend.’
‘Joe Wallace?’
Again, Antis gave a nod. ‘I met Wallace and told him I shared his anger at Sickert, and that it was unjust that he was still walking about free, while his mother and the other victims had no chance of justice. But then I told him there was a way to get retribution for what had happened to his mother and the others and have Sickert pay with his life, for him to be executed and everyone would know that he was the Ripper. I told him that there was a young woman who was a prostitute who also modelled for Sickert. I told him she was sick and on the point of death. I said that when she died, if I brought her body to him, he could inflict on her the same kind of wounds that had been inflicted on the Ripper’s victims. Then we’d leave her body at the National Gallery, where she’d be recognised as one of Sickert’s models, and I’d send an anonymous letter to Scotland Yard naming Sickert as the person who’d killed and butchered her.’
‘You were already planning to kill Anne-Marie?’
‘No!’ Anstis’ face became a mask of pain and anguish. ‘I loved Anne-Marie. I’d never hurt her.’
‘Then who?’
‘Kate Branson. I found out that she’d modelled for Sickert, and where her pitch was at Charing Cross Station. I went there to make her acquaintance. Get her to trust me.’
‘Which she did.’
‘Yes. She was a nice girl, but a necessary casualty to make sure that Sickert was arrested and tried. I made contact with her over a few weeks and was building up to the point where I would kill her, when everything changed.
‘Anne-Marie had come to my studio for another sitting, and this time she became … scornful of me. She’d always been scornful before, teased me, but this time she was worse. She taunted me, repeated the words that Sickert had used about me: an amateur dauber and a would-be Sunday painter. She also then thrust her naked body at me and began to describe what she and Sickert would do together. It was too much, and for the first time ever I hit her, and she fell, and struck her head on the fender. At first, I thought she was just unconscious, but then I realised she was dead. I’d killed her! I hadn’t meant to, it was the taunting and everything else that overcame me and I lashed out, and now she was dead.
‘What could I do? Go to the police? Tell them it had been an accident? They wouldn’t believe me. And then I thought of my plan for using Kate Branson. It would be the same, except it would now be Anne-Marie.
‘I put her in my father’s carriage and drove to Whitechapel. I collected Joe Wallace. We took the body to a shed where he did the work, cutting her up. I guess for him her body was just another piece of meat, but for me it was misery. I couldn’t stay in the shed and watch. When he’d finished, he brought her body out and we put it in the carriage and took it to the National Gallery, where we left it. I drove Joe home, then left a note at Scotland Yard naming Sickert. As I’d hoped, Sickert was arrested. But then I heard he was being released. It was so unjust!
‘On Wednesday I contacted Joe and told him the disaster that had happened, and that Sickert was going to get away with it. Luckily, I told him, another woman who had been his model had also just died. We’d do the same to this woman as we had to Anne-Marie and leave her body at the National Gallery. This would clinch it that Sickert was the one responsible.’
‘Wasn’t Wallace suspicious about these women turning up dead so soon after one another?’
‘I’m afraid that women who lead that kind of lifestyle often die young, and in tragic circumstances. Growing up in Whitechapel, Wallace knew that.’
‘So you picked Kate Branson up that night, killed her and took her to Wallace at Whitechapel.’
Anstis nodded. ‘The second time was easier. The first time, I was on edge in case we were caught leaving her body by the gallery.’
‘But then, Sickert was allowed to leave the country.’
‘I was furious. And desperate. I’d been keeping watch on Sickert and I knew he had some drunk staying at his studio, so I persuaded Joe to go there with me and kill him. I was sure that would put the final nail in Sickert’s coffin.’
‘But it didn’t,’ said Armstrong. ‘And then we got on to Joe.’
‘He came to see me, begging for money. He wanted me to get him out of the country. I told him I would, that I knew someone at Seven Dials who could arrange it. He believed me because everyone knows that everything can be bought in Seven Dials. I thought that once I’d killed Joe and left the razor there, that would be the end of it. I’d have to find another way to discredit Sickert, but at least I was safe. But then the barman at The Flower Pot contacted me. He said he knew who I was and what I’d done, and he wanted money to keep quiet. I couldn’t let that happen. If he knew, then just like Joe Wallace, he could talk.’
‘So you killed him.’
‘He told me that Daniel Wilson was looking for some rich man they believed was the person behind Joe Wallace and the killings.’
‘So you shot Daniel Wilson.’
‘It was the only way. I was sure the police would have been happy to think the case ended with Joe committing suicide, but Wilson and that Fenton woman were like terriers.’ He looked down at his broken wrist. ‘That woman did this. She should be charged.’
Feather looked down at the piece of paper Abberline had passed to him before the interview started, and said quietly: ‘The carriage you used has been identified as belonging to your father.’
‘No!’ shouted Anstis, alarmed. ‘No one could identify it! That’s rubbish!’
‘Let me put it another way,’ said Feather calmly. ‘The driver has been identified as your father.’
‘Impossible!’ said Anstis, staring wildly around. ‘He was masked!’ And then, as he realised what he’d said, he collapsed, falling face forward onto the table, his body heaving with sobs.
Armstrong looked towards Abberline and nodded, then at Inspector Feather.
‘Good work,’ he said. He looked at the constables and ordered. ‘Take him away to the custody cells.’
As Anstis was lifted from his chair and led out of the room, Armstrong turned to Feather. ‘Time to bring in Lord Yaxley. And I’m coming with you, Inspector.’