Belgrave Square (40 page)

“I think it is sane,” he said slowly. “But perhaps it is a little …” He searched for a word that would not be too cruel, too dismissive of an emotion he was trying to understand only too sharply in himself. “A little weak,” he said. “Life often gives one the feeling that it is beyond enduring at the time. But with courage, one does—one has to. Perhaps that is something Laura Anstiss had never learned.”

“Poor Laura,” she whispered. “How well you put it. It is as if you have known …” She drew in her breath quickly and looked away. “I’m sorry, that is intrusive. Thank you for being so—” She withdrew her hand. “So patient, Mr. Drummond. I feel better to have told you.”

“I will do all I can, I promise you,” he said quietly. “We have several others we suspect, whose motives are stronger than Lord Byam’s—and who can give no account of where they were at the time.”

“Have you?” There was a lift in her voice for the first time.

“Yes—yes. There is cause to have much hope.”

“Thank you.” And with a rustle of taffeta, she moved away back towards the room and the lights and the laughter.

At the end of the evening when the last guests had departed, Charlotte, Emily and Jack were seated in the withdrawing room. The gas was turned low and the last glasses and small dishes were packed up for the servants to take away and deal with before they too were able to go to bed.

Emily turned to Jack. She was interested in Charlotte’s affairs, but his took precedence.

“Was the evening successful?” she asked eagerly. “You seemed to be a long time in the library with Lord Anstiss. Did he ask you a great deal?”

Jack smiled, wiping as if by magic the tiredness from his face.

“Yes,” he said with deep satisfaction. “And he told me a great deal which I did not know. He is an extraordinarily …” He looked for the right word. “… magnetic man. His knowledge is vast, but far more than that, he speaks with so much vitality and wit. And I think his influence is greater than I first supposed.”

“But he liked you?” Emily pressed with a fine grasp of what was important. “What did he say? Jack, don’t keep us in suspense!”

His smile broadened. “He invited me to join a most select society which does a great deal of good work, often secretly. They provide funds for many charities, strive to fight inequity and injustice, even some of the more dangerous and ugly facets of crime.”

“It sounds excellent!” Emily was enthusiastic. “Are you going to join?”

“No!” Charlotte said with vehemence so sharp both Jack and Emily turned to her with incredulity. “No,” she said more moderately. “You must know a great deal more about it before you join anything.”

“Charlotte! It is a society wholly dedicated to doing good,” Emily said reasonably. “What could possibly be
wrong with that?” She turned around to Jack again. “Isn’t it?”

“Yes of course it is,” Jack agreed. “And from what Lord Anstiss says, it would be the most powerful single step I could take to ensure the support of those who really matter in the political and social world.”

Charlotte wanted to muster an argument, but all she could think of was Pitt’s fears for Micah Drummond, his misery over the corruption he had uncovered, and the deeper corruption he so far only suspected.

“And what do they want from you in return?” she demanded. “What loyalty? What sacrifice of your independence, perhaps in time of your conscience?”

“Nothing.” Jack was surprised and mildly amused. “It is a society for doing good, Charlotte!”

“But secret?” she persisted.

“Not secret,” he corrected. “Discreet. Surely that is how charity should be, done quietly, modestly and without seeking recognition?”

“Yes.” She was reluctant to admit it not because what he said was untrue, but because she feared so much more. “But Jack, there may be other things. Thomas is dealing with a society at the moment …”

Emily looked at her with skepticism. “He is investigating the murder of a usurer, you told me.”

“Yes, but he has uncovered a society as well …” She was out of her depth and floundering. She was not prepared to tell them of the police corruption. It was too indefinite in form as yet, and too painful. In some basic way she felt it reflected on Pitt, on his profession, and she did not wish them to know if it could be avoided.

“London is full of societies,” Jack said more quietly, aware that her concern for him was real. “This one is very honorable, I promise you.”

“What is it called?”

“I don’t know—Anstiss did not tell me.”

“Be careful.”

“I will be. I give you my word.” He stood up. “Now it is past time Emily went to bed, and you too I am sure. Would you prefer to go home in the carriage now, or stay here until
morning and go then? You are very welcome, you know, always.”

“Thank you, but I will go now. I would prefer to be there when Thomas leaves in the morning.”

Jack smiled and took Emily’s hand in his. “Then good night, my dear.”

Pitt listened as he had breakfast to all that Charlotte related to him of the evening before, which was only impressions of conversation, emotions and fears, and the conviction that Micah Drummond had learned to love Eleanor Byam, with all the pain and conflict that that meant. She did not mention Anstiss’s invitation to Jack to join the society. She would not burden him with that yet.

Pitt did not say anything, but he knew she understood his silence. He kissed her, long and gently, and went out into the hot, dusty street to find an omnibus and travel slowly to Scotland Yard and resume his investigations of Latimer’s cases. From there he spent a miserable day going from one old underworld source to another, through filthy alleys, up steps of rotting wood into rookeries where rats scuttled at the sound of his feet, squeaking, their claws rattling on the boards and their little eyes red in the shadows. Refuse lay heaped in slowly sagging piles and the gutters stank in the heat. He swatted ineffectually at some of the flies, and gave all his coppers to children who begged.

Finally in a small, crowded public alehouse called the Grinning Rat he sat opposite a little man with a twisted arm, broken when as a child he had been a sweep’s boy and fallen inside one of the vast chimneys. It had healed badly, and been broken a second time when he slipped off a church roof, stealing the lead, and now it was deformed past help. He made his living by selling information.

“Joey.” Pitt brought his wandering attention back from a large man with a protuberant belly hanging over grimy trousers and a tankard of ale in each hand.

Joey looked back at Pitt reluctantly.

“Yes, Mr. Pitt. I dunno wot yer wanna hear.” His voice sank into a plaintive whine as he expected to be criticized.

“ ’E in’t wot yer’d call reelly bad—just a bit kind o’ selective abaht ’Oo ’E does, like. Y’ unnerstand?”

“No,” Pitt said unhappily. “Explain to me, and there’ll behalf a guinea.”

“ ’Alf a guinea.” Joey’s face brightened.

“The truth,” Pitt warned. “Not what you think I want to hear. You don’t know what I want, or don’t want. If I discover you’re telling me lies I’ll come back and do you for everything in the book—I swear it.”

Joey let out a wail of outrage.

“Be quiet!” Pitt warned sharply. “Do you want everyone in the place looking at you?”

“Yer an ’ard man,” Joey complained.

“I am,” Pitt agreed. “Now tell me.”

And slowly Joey told Pitt what he most feared to hear. There was no explanation for Latimer’s omission to press some of his cases, for not calling certain witnesses. Joey did not know of his having taken money for his decisions, but he had assumed it, because to him there was no other answer. Why else did men do things, unless of course it was from fear? But to Joey, policemen of Latimer’s rank had nothing to fear. They were the powerful, the unassailable, the safe.

“Thank you,” Pitt said with a bitter misery inside. He handed over the half guinea he had promised and left the Grinning Rat. Tomorrow he would go back to Clerkenwell and Sergeant Innes.

Of course there were still the ordinary debtors from Weems’s first list, and perhaps Innes would turn up evidence against one of them. He half hoped for it, although he did not expect it; but perhaps a more conscious, sharper half would hate it even more should some desperate man struggling to survive prove to have shot Weems.

“Nothing,” Innes said gloomily, his thin face tired and without any lift of hope anymore.

“Nothing on Weems’s private life?” Pitt pressed pointlessly. “He must have had friends of some sort, surely? No women—not one?”

“Found nothin’,” Innes said flatly. His eyes looked anxious, even guilty.

“What is it?” Pitt demanded. They were sitting in the small room, little more than a cubbyhole, where Innes kept his notes and papers on the Weems case. Innes was perched
on the narrow windowsill, leaving the solitary chair for Pitt, as the senior officer, and his guest.

Innes looked even more uncomfortable.

“I know as ’ow Mr. Latimer gets ’is money, sir. It weren’t borrered from Weems—”

Pitt would have been pleased, had not the look on Innes’s face made it impossible. Whatever the answer was, it was no better than usury.

“Well?” he said more sharply than he had intended.

Innes took no offense, he understood.

“Gambling, sir. ’E gambles, very successfully, it seems.”

“How do you know?”

“Discovered it by accident, sir. Was lookin’ inter one of our local debtors, ’Oo gambles. Come across proof as Mr. Latimer does—in a big way. An’ ’e wins, no doubt about it. ’E knows ’is bare-knuckle fighters.” His face was pinched with unhappiness. Apart from the brutality, bare-knuckle fighting was illegal and they both knew it; so would Latimer.

“I see,” Pitt said slowly. He did not bother to ask if Innes was sure beyond any doubt. He would not have mentioned it until he was.

Innes was looking at him earnestly. Neither of them needed to explain the possibilities ahead. Latimer would be ruined if his gambling, and condoning an illegal sport, were known. Was that what Weems had blackmailed him over? That would account for his name on the second list.

It was a powerful motive for murder.

“What are we going to do, Mr. Pitt?” Innes said quietly. “You want me ter go ter Mr. Drummond, like?”

It was a generous offer, made at some cost, and Pitt felt a tiny spark of warmth because of it.

“No,” he said with a bleak smile. “Thank you. I’ll go.”

“Yes sir.”

9

P
ITT
MADE NO OBJECTION
whatever when Charlotte said she would like to attend Emily’s musical evening towards the end of that week. Indeed when she explained, by the way, as though she had assumed he knew it already, that the Carswells would be there, he was quite openly pleased.

They had no time to discuss it because he was leaving early to go to Clerkenwell. He and Innes must work on the very last of the debtors on Weems’s first list. Little by little Innes had whittled it down, but there were still a dozen or so left who were not accounted for beyond doubt. It was still possible one of them might have gone to Cyrus Street late in the evening, been admitted, and seized the blunderbuss, found the powder, and loaded the gun. But neither of them believed it. Weems may have despised his clients, but he surely knew despair when he saw it, and over the years had learned that desperate people can be dangerous.

Today they planned to question Weems’s errand runner, Windy Miller, yet again, although they expected little useful from him, and later perhaps his housekeeper, in case there were any details they had overlooked, any thread of knowledge however frail. But both of them were convinced that Weems’s killer was someone on the second list—or else Byam himself, although Innes had not said so, because of course he still did not know of Byam, a fact which weighed heavily on Pitt’s mind and disturbed his conscience increasingly.

Charlotte kissed him good-bye, and when he was gone immediately set about that housework which could not wait, so that she could leave in the late afternoon with a clear mind and no housewifely guilt.

By six o’clock she was sitting on the Hepplewhite chair in Emily’s withdrawing room, wearing a rose-colored gown spread around her elegantly, and surrounded by about thirty other people also sitting upright, facing the grand piano where a very earnest young man was playing some extraordinarily beautiful, dark and sad music by Franz Liszt. Indeed it was so lovely Charlotte’s attention was entirely taken by it and she forgot even to glance at Addison Carswell, Regina, one of the Misses Carswell, or at Herbert Fitzherbert and Odelia Morden, or Fanny Hilliard, whom she was surprised to see present. Then she realized precisely what political value Fanny had in the possible fall from grace of Herbert Fitzherbert and Emily’s so gentle part in it.