The Whitechapel Conspiracy - Anne Perry [107]
When Tellman closed the door without speaking Pitt realized it was not Karansky, and looked around. His mouth dropped with amazement, then alarm.
“It’s all right!” Tellman said quickly. “But I’ve learned something I have to tell you tonight. It’s …” He pushed his hand over his hair, slicked back as always. “Actually, it’s not all right.” He found he was shaking. “It’s the most … it’s the biggest … it’s the most hideous and terrible thing I’ve ever heard, if it’s true. And it’s going to destroy everything!”
As Tellman told him, the last remaining color bleached out of Pitt’s face and he sat motionless with horror, until his body began to shiver uncontrollably, as if the cold had gotten inside him.
10
IT WAS NEARLY midnight when Tellman reached Keppel Street, but he would have no chance in the morning to tell Gracie what he had learned, and Charlotte also. They must know. This hideous conspiracy was bigger than any individual’s career, or even their safety. Not that keeping it from them would protect them. Nothing he or Pitt said could prevent them from continuing to pursue the truth. In both women, devotion to Pitt, as well as a sense of justice, was far stronger than any idea of obedience they might have possessed.
Therefore they must have the very slight protection that a knowledge of the conspiracy’s enormity might give them.
And they might help. He told himself that fiercely as he stood on the doorstep and looked up at the dark windows. He was a police officer, a citizen of a land in very real danger of being plunged into violence from which it might not emerge for years, and even when it did, much of its heritage and identity could be destroyed. The safety of two women, even one he admired and one he loved, could not be placed before that.
He lifted up the brass knocker and let it fall. It thudded loudly in the silence. Nothing stirred right along the street. He knocked again, three times, and again.
A light came on upstairs, and a few moments later Charlotte herself answered the door, her eyes wide with fear, her hair a dark shadow across her shoulder.
“It’s all right,” Tellman said immediately, knowing what she feared. “But I’ve got things I have to tell you.”
She pulled the door wider and he followed her inside. She called Gracie, and led him through to the kitchen. She riddled the stove and put more coal on. He bent to help her too late, feeling clumsy. She smiled at him and put the kettle on the hob.
When Gracie appeared, tousle-haired from sleep and, to Tellman, looking about fourteen, they sat around the table with tea, and he told them what he had learned from Lyndon Remus and all that it meant.
It was nearly three in the morning before, at last, Tellman went out into the dark streets to return home. Charlotte had offered to allow him to sleep in the front parlor, but he had declined. He did not feel it was proper, and he needed the width and the loneliness of the street to think.
When Charlotte woke it was daylight. At first all she remembered was that Pitt was not there. The space beside her was the kind of emptiness you have when a tooth has been lost, aching, tender, not right.
Then she remembered Tellman’s visit and all that he had told them about the Whitechapel murders, Prince Eddy and Annie Crook, and the fearful conspiracy to conceal it all.
She sat up and pushed the covers away. There was no point in lying there any longer. There was no warmth, either physical or of the heart.
She started to wash and dress automatically. Odd how much less pleasure there was in something simple like brushing and curling her hair now that Pitt was not there to see it, even to annoy her by touching it and pulling pieces out of the pins again. She missed the touch of his hands even more than the sound of his voice. It was a physical pain inside her, like