How blind I was. He has denied the very existence of the loan, and I am finished. I shall lose the factories, and a thousand men will be out of work, and all those who depend upon them will perish likewise. It is my fault, for trusting a man not worthy of honor. I cannot live to see it happen; I cannot bear to watch it, or face the men I have destroyed.

I am taking the only course left to me. May God forgive me.

James Sissons

Beside it lay a note of debt for twenty thousand pounds, signed by the Prince of Wales. Pitt stared at them and they swam before his eyes. The room seemed to sway around him as if he were aboard a ship. He put his hands on the desk to steady himself. Sissons was beyond help. When the first clerk came in, when he was found, and the letter and note of debt with him, it would do more damage than half a dozen sticks of dynamite. An unrepaid loan to the Prince of Wales, for him to race horses, drink wine and give presents to his mistresses, while in Spitalfields fifteen hundred families went into beggary! Shops would close, tradesmen would go out of business, houses would be boarded up and people would live on the streets.

There would be riots that would make Bloody Sunday in Trafalgar Square look like a playground squabble. The whole of the East End of London would erupt.

And when Remus was given the last piece of evidence he needed to expose the Whitechapel murderer as in the service of the throne, no one would care whether the Queen or the Prince of Wales, or anyone else, had known of it or wished it; there would be revolution. The old order would be gone forever, replaced by rage, and then terror, and then unrelenting destruction, the good and the bad torn apart together.

Law would be the first to suffer, the law that oppressed and the law that protected equally, and finally all law, even that which governed conscience and the violence within.

He reached for the letter. If he tore it up, no one else would ever know. Then he noticed beside it a pattern of tiny splatters of ink with a large clear space in the center. It was a moment before he realized what it was; then he picked up the inkwell and placed it very carefully over the unmarked patch. It fit exactly. The inkwell normally sat to the left of Sissons! Had it been moved to make him seem right-handed?

Carefully he took the dead man’s left hand and turned it over, gently touching the insides of the first and second fingers. He felt the ridge where Sissons normally held a pen. Why?

He had been shot in the right side of his head… and someone had realized too late that he was left-handed.

A murder made to look like suicide… but by whom? And who might lie and say Sissons was right-handed, or could use either hand?

He must make certain this was seen as the murder it was. If he got rid of the gun, dropped it in one of the sugar vats, there could be no denying it.

This half of the conspiracy could be stifled. Then even if Remus broke the other story, the rage here in Spitalfields would not erupt. There would be anger, but against Sissons, not against the throne.

Was that what he wanted? His hand stayed in the air, poised above the paper. If the Prince of Wales had borrowed money for his own extravagance and not repaid, even when it would bring ruin to thousands of people, then he deserved to be overthrown, stripped of his privileges and left as comparatively destitute as those in Spitalfields were now. Even if he became a fugitive, a refugee in another land, it was no worse than what happened to many. He would have to start again as a stranger, just as Isaac and Leah Karansky and tens of thousands like them had done. In the last analysis, all human life was equal.

What justice was there if Pitt concealed this monstrous selfishness, criminal irresponsibility, because the guilty man was the Prince of Wales? It made him party to the sin.

And if he did not, then countless people who had no say in it at all would be consumed by the violence which would follow, and the destruction which would leave poverty and waste behind it, perhaps for a generation.

His mind was in turmoil. Every belief he had lived by forbade he conceal the truth of the debt. Yet even as his thoughts raced, his hand closed over the paper. He crunched it up, then unfolded it and tore it across again and again until it was in tiny pieces. Not yet certain why, he put the note of debt far down inside his shirt, next to his body.

He was shivering, the sweat standing out cold on his skin. He had committed himself. There was no way to turn back.

If this had to be known as murder, then he must make it look like one. He had surely known enough murders to know what the police would look for. Sissons had been dead for at least two or three hours. There was no danger they would suspect him. Better it should be an impersonal robbery than hatred or revenge, which would indicate someone who knew him.

Was there money in the office? He should make it look as if it had been searched, at the very least. And quickly. He must not seem to have stood there debating what to do. An honest man would have raised the alarm immediately. He had already delayed almost too long. There was no time for indecision.

He pulled out the desk drawers and tipped them onto the floor, then the files. There was a little petty cash. He could not bring himself to take it. Instead he put it under one of the drawers and replaced it. It was not very satisfactory, but it would have to do.

He riffled quickly through other pieces of paper to see if there was anything else about the Prince’s loan. They seemed to be all concerning the factory and its daily running, orders and receipts, a few letters of intent. Then one caught his eye because he knew the handwriting. Coldness filled him as he read it.

My dear friend,

It is a most noble sacrifice you are making for the cause. I cannot stress how much you are admired among your fellows. Your ruin at the hands of a certain person will set off a fire which will never be extinguished. The light of it will be seen all over Europe, and your name remembered with reverence as a hero of the people.

Long after the violence and the death are forgotten your memorial will be the peace and prosperity of those ordinary men and women who came after.

Yours with the utmost respect.

It was signed with a swirl of the pen which could have been anything. What flared in Pitt’s brain like an explosion was the fact that the writer had known about Sissons’s ruin, and very possibly even his death. The wording was ambiguous, but it seemed that was what it meant.

He must destroy it also, immediately. Already he could hear footsteps in the passage outside. He had been gone too long. Wally would be looking for him to make sure everything was all right.

He ripped the letter into pieces. There was no time to get rid of it, but at least it would be illegible. He would have to make an opportunity to put the remnants of both letters, and the gun, in one of the vats.

Even as he was moving towards the door he remembered where he had seen the handwriting. He stumbled and banged into the corner of the desk as the full import struck him. It had been during the investigation of Martin Fetters’s death-it was John Adinett’s hand!

He stood stock-still, dizzy for an instant, his leg throbbing where the desk corner had bruised it, but he was only dimly aware.

Wally’s footsteps were almost at the door.

Adinett had known of the plan for Sissons’s ruin, and had praised him for it! He was not a royalist, as they had presumed, but as far from it as possible. So why had he killed Martin Fetters?

The door opened and Wally peered around it, the lantern in his hand making his face look ghostly in the upward light.