Bedford Square (44 page)

“Army records would know where he came from,” Pitt pointed out.

Tellman flushed. He was furious with himself because he had not thought of that.

“Well, if someone were arter ’im, ’e wouldn’t go back there, would ’e?” Gracie said defensively. “If we can work that out, mebbe they could too … stands ter reason, don’t it?” She looked from Pitt to Tellman and back again. “ ’E’d a’ gorn somewhere as nob’dy knows ’im. I would.”

“Why would anybody be after him?” Pitt asked. “He didn’t do anything, or know anything, so far as we can tell.”

“Well, w’y else would ’e scarper?” she asked reasonably. “Goin’ by wot you said, ’e ’ad a decent job an’ a good place. Yer don’t jus’ up an’ leave things like that, less yer got summink better or there’s someb’dy arter yer.”

“Bit chancy, wasn’t it?” Tellman said reluctantly, flashing Gracie a look of gratitude, and obviously unwilling to slight the favor by criticizing her logic, but driven to it by necessity. “Someone we don’t know of went after Cole, just the day
before poor Slingsby gets done in by someone who wants to pretend he’s Cole?”

“That’s it!” Pitt banged his fist on the table. Suddenly it was obvious. “They went after Cole first. They tried to kill him, but somehow they failed. He got away. Perhaps he was a better soldier than they realized, experienced in hand-to-hand fighting,” he said eagerly. “He escaped, but he knew they’d come after him again, perhaps a knife in the back next time, or a shot. So he took to his heels and disappeared … anywhere. It doesn’t matter where … just out of London, to a place they’d never think of looking.” He turned to Gracie. “As you said, they know his military record, that’s why they wanted him, so the last place he’d go would be back to anywhere he had a connection with.” He stared around the table. “That’s why we can’t find Cole … and I daresay we never will.”

“So they found someone who looked like him,” Charlotte took up the train of reasoning. “They had the snuffbox anyway, and they either stole the sock receipt or had one made up.”

“Had it made up,” Tellman put in. “Easy enough. Go and buy three pairs. Get yourself noticed. Say something about being a soldier, the importance of keeping your feet right. The shop clerk remembered all that, but not much about his face.”

“Who is ’they’?” Charlotte asked with a little shake of her head, a sharp return from logic to emotion. “Cadell … if it has to be … and who else? Ernest Wallace? Why?” She bit her lip, and her expression betrayed her disbelief. “I still can’t accept that.” She looked from Pitt to Tellman. “You haven’t found any reason why he should suddenly need money, or connected him to any plot to invest in Africa or anywhere else. Aunt Vespasia says he just wasn’t that sort of person.”

Pitt sighed. He reached his hand across the table and put it over hers.

“Of course she doesn’t want to think so, but what is the alternative?”

“That someone else is guilty,” she answered, her voice
without the certainty she would have liked. “And he killed himself … because … I don’t know. He was so worn down by the blackmail he hadn’t the strength to go on.”

“And confessed,” Pitt said gently, “knowing what that would do to his family? To Theodosia? And they have grownup children, a son and two daughters. Have you seen what Lyndon Remus and the other newspapers have made of the scandal? Poor Gordon-Cumming pales beside it.”

“Then he could never have done it,” she said desperately. “He must have been murdered.”

“By whom?” he asked. “No one came or went but the family servants, and the entrances were observed all the time.”

She took her hand away, fists clenched. “Well, I still refuse to believe it. There’s something we don’t know ….”

“There’s a lot of things we don’t know,” he said dryly. He ticked them off on his fingers. “We don’t know why Cadell wanted or needed money, or even if that was the purpose of the blackmail. We don’t know why he chose specifically the other members of the orphanage committee of the Jessop Club. There must have been dozens of other men he knew as well, and could have created a web of fear around, built on imagination and misinterpretation. We certainly don’t know how he ever made the acquaintance of Ernest Wallace or why he trusted him.”

“We don’t know why Wallace lied to protect him and is still lying,” Tellman added.

“Yes, we do,” Pitt answered. “At least, we can deduce it. He is in Newgate and doesn’t know that Cadell is dead. He must be assuming that Cadell will twist the knife in Dunraithe White, and Wallace will be acquitted. He also doesn’t know that White has just resigned from the bench.”

“Then tell him,” Charlotte retorted. “That may concentrate his mind wonderfully. Show him he is completely alone. He has been let down on every side. Cadell has escaped, in a fashion, and left him to hang … alone.”

“Don’t make no difference whether you ’ang alone or
together,” Gracie said with disgust. “Don’t suppose it feels no different. ’e killed Slingsby, so ’e’ll ’ang any which way.”

Pitt rose to his feet. “I’ll still go and see him.”

Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Now? It’s half past six.”

“I’ll be back by nine,” he promised, walking to the door. “I have to speak to him.”

Pitt hated visiting prisons. The walls closed in on him with the cold gray misery of countless angry and wasted lives. Hopelessness seemed to seep from the stones, and his footsteps echoed behind the warder’s like multiple treads, as if he were preceded and followed by unseen inmates, ghosts who would never escape.

Ernest Wallace would be tried in a week or two. He was brought into the small room where Pitt waited for him. He looked small and tight, and beneath his smug expression there remained a lifelong anger that was bone-deep. He glanced at Pitt, but there was no visible fear in his eyes. It seemed to amuse him that Pitt had come all the way to Newgate to see him. He sat down at the other side of the bare wooden table without being asked. The warder, a barrel-chested man with a disinterested face, stood by the door. Whatever these two were going to say, he had heard it all before.

“Where did you go after you had fought with Slingsby?” Pitt began, almost conversationally.

If Wallace was surprised he hid it well. “Don’ remember,” he answered. “Wot’s it matter nah?”

“What did you fight about?”

“I told yer, least I told the other rozzer, ’baht summink wot ’e took orff me as e’d no right ter. I tried ter get it back orff ’im, an ’e laid inter me. I fought ’im … natural. I’ve a right ter save me own life.” He said that with some satisfaction, meeting Pitt’s eyes squarely.

Pitt had thought he expected the blackmailer to influence the trial and get him acquitted, at least of murder. Now, in the fetid room with its smell of despair, he was certain of it.

“And when you saw that you had killed him, you just fled?” Pitt said aloud.

“Wot?”

“You ran away.”

“Yeah. Well, I didn’t think as any rozzer’d believe me. An’ I were right, weren’t I? Or I wouldn’t be here now, lookin’ at a charge o’ murder.” He said it with considerable self-justification. “Yer’d a’ seen as I were defendin’ meself from a geezer wot were bigger’n me, an’ got a right temper on ’im.” He almost smiled.

“Is Albert Cole dead too?” Pitt said suddenly.

Wallace kept his face straight, but he could not prevent the ebb of color from his skin, and his hands twitched involuntarily where he had laid them with a deliberate show of ease on the tabletop.

“Oo?”

“Albert Cole.” Pitt smiled. “The man Slingsby looked like and was mistaken for when we found him. He had a receipt belonging to Cole in his pocket.”

Wallace grinned. “Oh, yeah! Yer made a right mess o’ that, din’t yer.”

“It was the receipt that did it,” Pitt explained. “And the lawyer from Lincoln’s Inn who identified him. And of course Cole is missing.”

Wallace affected surprise. “Is ’e? Well, I never. Life’s full o’ funny little things like that … i’n’t it?” He was enjoying himself, and he wanted Pitt to know it.

Pitt waited patiently.

“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “You see, I think you can’t tell me where you went after you killed Slingsby because you came back, within minutes, and loaded his body into a vegetable cart you’d ’borrowed’ after dark. You took it to Bedford Square and left it on General Balantyne’s doorstep, exactly as you were told to do.”

Wallace was tense, his shoulder muscles locked, the sinews in his thin neck standing out, but his eyes did not waver from Pitt’s.

“Do yer? Well, yer can’t prove it, so it don’ make no
difference. I says as I killed ’im ’cos ’e came at me, an’ scarpered arterwards ’cos I were scared as no rozzer’d believe me.” His voice descended into mockery. “An’ I’m real sorry abaht that, me lud. I won’t never make a mistake like that again.”

“Talking about judges,” Pitt observed steadily, “Mr. Dunraithe White has resigned from the bench.”

Wallace looked mystified.

“Am I supposed ter know wot yer talkin’ abaht?”

Pitt was shaken, but he concealed it. “Perhaps not. I thought you might come up before him.”

“Well if ’e i’n’t a judge no more, I won’t, will I? Stands ter reason.”

Pitt dropped the blow he had been waiting for.

“And another thing you might not have heard, being in here … Leo Cadell is dead.”

Wallace sat motionless.

“Committed suicide,” Pitt added, “after confessing to blackmail.”

Wallace’s eyes widened. “Blackmail?” he said with what Pitt would have sworn was surprise.

“Yes. He’s dead.”

“Yeah … yer said. So is that all?” He looked at Pitt with wide eyes, untroubled, his lips still smiling, not the fixed and awful grin of a man whose last hope has slipped away, but the satisfaction of someone supremely confident, even if he had heard some news which he did not completely understand.

It was Pitt who was thrown into confusion. Reason and hope disappeared from his grasp.

Wallace saw it, and his smile widened, reaching his eyes.

Pitt was suddenly furious, aching to be able to hit him. He rose to his feet and told the warder he was finished before he betrayed his defeat even more. He walked out of the gray suffocation of Newgate totally perplexed.

He arrived home in Keppel Street still just as confused, and if possible even angrier, but now with himself rather than only with Wallace.

“What’s wrong?” Charlotte demanded as soon as he was
in the kitchen. They must all have heard his footsteps coming down the passage from the front door, and were sitting around the table staring at him expectantly. He had not even bothered to take his boots off. He sat down, and automatically Gracie poured him a mug of tea.

“I told him I believed he had come back and moved the body to Bedford Square,” he answered. “And I could see it shook him.”

Tellman nodded with satisfaction.

“And I told him Dunraithe White had resigned,” Pitt went on. “And it meant nothing to him at all.”

“I don’t suppose he knew his name,” Charlotte explained. “Just that there was a judge in the blackmailer’s power.”

“And then I told him Cadell was dead,” Pitt finished, looking at their expectant faces. “He didn’t give a damn.”

“What?” Tellman was incredulous, his jaw dropping.

“He must have,” Charlotte said abruptly. “He must have known Cadell. It can’t have been all done by letter.” Her eyes widened. “Or are you saying it wasn’t Cadell after all?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” he admitted. “Except that I still don’t understand it.”

There were several minutes of silence. The kettle whistled on the hob, gathering shrillness, and Gracie got up to move it over.

Pitt sipped his tea gratefully. He had not realized how thirsty he was, or how keen to get the taste of prison air out of his mouth.

Charlotte looked apologetic, and very faintly pink.

“General Balantyne was worried about the funds for the orphanage at Kew …” she said tentatively.

“I’ve been out there,” Pitt answered wearily. “I’ve been over the books with a fine-toothed comb. Every penny is accounted for, and I’ve seen the children. They are healthy, well clothed and well fed. Anyway, Balantyne thought there was too little money given them, not too much.”

“That’s a turn up,” Gracie said dryly. “I never ’eard of an orphanage afore wot ’ad enough money, let alone too much. An’ come ter that, I never ’eard o’ one wot fed an’ clothed its
kids proper. Beggin’ yer pardon, Mr. Pitt, but I think you was took in. It were likely the master’s own kids as yer saw, not the orphans.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Pitt said wearily. “I saw upwards of twenty children.”

“Twenty?” Gracie was incredulous.

“At least. More like twenty-five,” he assured her.

“In an orphanage?”

“Yes.”

“ ’ow big’s this orphanage, then? Couple o’ cottages, is it?”

“No, of course not. It’s a very large house, dozen bedrooms or more, originally, I should think.”

Gracie looked at him with weary patience. “Then you was took proper. ’Ouse that size they’d ’ave an ’undred kids at least. Ten to a room, countin’ little ones. Big ones ter look arter ’em.”

“There were nothing like that many.” He thought back on the clear, light rooms he had seen, admittedly only two or three of them, but he had chosen them at random, and Horsfall had been willing enough to show him everywhere he wished to go.

“Then w’ere was the rest o’ them?” Gracie asked.

“There were no more,” Pitt replied, frowning. “And the money was about right for that number, to feed and clothe and pay for the fuel and keeping of the house.”

“Can’t a’ bin much, then,” Gracie said dismissively. “Yer can feed an orphan kid, fer a few pence a day, on bread an’ taters and gravy. Clothe ’em in ’and-me-downs and stuff wot’s bin unpicked an’ remade. Get a pile fer a shillin’ down Seven Dials way. Same wif boots. An’ w’en yer places kids, which in’t often, like as not they leave their clothes be’ind. An o’ course w’en they grows out o’ them, someone else grows inter ’em.”

“What are you suggesting?” Charlotte turned to her, her eyes wide and dark in the dying light. The gas was flickering yellow on the wall.

“Maybe they are good at placing children?” Tellman said.
“If they give them a little education they could go into trades, be useful?”