Long Spoon Lane (36 page)

“I followed you,” he explained, seeing Tellman’s sodden appearance and dour expression. “You don’ look ’appy, Mr. Tellman. Didn’t catch anybody?”

“I was busy making sure you weren’t caught!” Tellman said sharply. “Did you find anything?”

“Oh yes, oh yes indeed.” Pricey rubbed his hands together. “A very valuable piece of information it is. Nice ’ouse, you might say. Bit new fer my taste. Like old stuff, got a bit of a story ter it.”

“What did you find?”

“Statements, Mr. Tellman. Confession ter rape of a young woman. Not a good girl, but not a bad one neither. All got a bit out of ’and like. Witnesses all tied up proper. Would ’a made a nasty scandal, that. But nobody did nuffin’. ’Ushed up, it were.”

“By whom?”

“That yer ’ave ter pay fer, Mr. Tellman. ’Oo done it, an’ ’oo knows ’e done it, an’ kept it ter their selves.”

Tellman was shivering. “Come inside,” he ordered, and turned to the door. Upstairs in his room, he went to the drawer where he kept all the money he could spare. “That’s it, Pricey.” He held out ten gold coins. He hated to part with it; had there been any other way he would not have. But if what Pricey had found could finish Wetron, it was a small cost to pay. “Now let me see it first.”

“Ten pounds, eh?” Pricey looked at it with enthusiasm. “That yer own money, then, Mr. Tellman? Yer must want it real bad.”

“You’ll need a friend one day, Pricey, even if it’s me not coming after you when I’ve a fair idea who’s behind something. I’m a better friend than enemy, I can promise you.”

“Are yer threatenin’ me, Mr. Tellman?” Pricey said indignantly.

“This is too important for games,” Tellman answered gravely. “I can get this easy, or hard. Friends or enemies, Pricey?”

Pricey shrugged. “I guess ten nicker clean is more’n twenty wi’ dirt in it. ’Ere y’are.” He handed over the papers. “ ’Oo’s ’ouse was it, then? Tell me that, eh?”

“You don’t want to know that, Pricey. It’ll give you bad dreams.” Tellman looked at the papers Pricey had given him and unfolded them carefully. The top one was a witness’s account of a girl flirting with, and then being raped by a young man too drunk and too arrogant to believe that anyone as ordinary as he thought she was could refuse him. It was a stupid, violent, and ugly scene.

The second paper was a confession to the rape, in detail, which made it obvious it was the crime described in the first paper. It was signed by Piers Denoon, and witnessed by Roger Simbister, superintendent at Cannon Street Police Station.

“Thank you, Pricey,” Tellman said sincerely. “I’m warning you, for your own sake, you’d be better never to mention this to anyone at all, drunk or sober.”

“I can keep a still tongue in me ’ead, Mr. Tellman.”

“You’d better, Pricey. You stole this from Superintendent Wetron’s home. Remember that, and remember what it would be likely to cost you if he ever found out.”

“Gawd Almighty! Wot yer let me in fer, Mr. Tellman?” Pricey looked distinctly pale.

“Ten pounds, Pricey, and my gratitude. Now leave here, and go about your business. You were asleep in bed last night, and you know nothing about anything.”

“On my life, I don’t!” Pricey swore. “Don’t take it personal, but I think mebbe I don’t never want ter see yer agin!”

Pitt held it in his hand with a sense of blinding realization. He was in his own kitchen, where he had been all night since getting home from Denoon’s house. He had spent half the time at least pacing the floor back and forth, worried sick about Tellman.

“Piers Denoon,” he said slowly. “Wetron almost certainly blackmailed him into providing funds for the anarchists, and reporting back to him all their doings. He couldn’t get Magnus Landsborough to bomb streets where people would be killed, so he got Piers to kill him, so a new man could take over, someone who would do as Wetron told him.” He looked up. “Thank you, Tellman. You’ve done superbly.”

Tellman felt himself blush. Pitt did not give this much praise lightly, and in spite of a desire to be modest, he knew that he had indeed done well. He had been profoundly afraid. He was still queasy when he thought of Wetron spending all night chasing a phantom bomber, getting Edward Denoon and his entire household out of bed, for nothing. It was a pleasure for which he might yet pay very dearly. He had not told Pitt how it had been. Perhaps he should, while the pleasure of it was still unalloyed?

Pitt saw him smiling. “What is it?” he said softly, although the humor in his eyes suggested he knew.

Eventually and with too few words, Tellman described the night’s events.

Pitt laughed. At first it was tense, a little high-pitched with nerves, then, as Tellman continued, with dour economy picturing the between-stairs maid’s screams, the cook’s fury, and the butler’s jittering clumsiness, Pitt started to laugh from deep inside himself. He did so freely and with such delight that neither of them were aware of making so much noise that they did not hear Gracie come to the doorway, her hair tied up in a clean cap and her apron on already to clean out the stove.

They both apologized, like boys caught with their fingers in the jam pot, and sat obediently while she relit the stove and boiled the kettle to make tea.

It was nearly half past eight when Tellman finally left to go to work, hollow-eyed with tiredness, but with a good breakfast inside him. Pitt pondered on how much to tell Charlotte, and what to do next with the day. One thing he had already decided, the proof must be taken immediately to Narraway. He would not let it remain in his house where his wife and children were for even one more hour. Then he would go to see Vespasia. There was much to ask her, some of it acutely painful.

“Brilliant,” Narraway said with deep satisfaction as he looked up at Pitt after reading the papers. He was elegantly dressed, but his face was pale. “You did superbly. But now Wetron will be more dangerous than ever. He will know that Tellman caused these to be stolen, and he will not have found last night’s embarrassment amusing. He will never forgive either of you for that.”

“I know,” Pitt acknowledged. He was afraid for Charlotte now, not from any threat from Voisey, but from Wetron. He was even more afraid for Tellman, who had caused Wetron’s discomfiture at Denoon’s house. The fact that he had also witnessed it would be like pouring oil on the flames. “We must destroy him quickly…” He felt the urgency twisting inside him. “Can’t we have him arrested today?”

Narraway’s dark face was tight with emotion. “I’ll send one of my other men to your house, armed, just in case. There’s nothing I can do to protect Tellman. I assume Piers Denoon was the one who killed Magnus?” His mouth tightened. “His own cousin. I wonder if he hated him anyway, or if that was a further twist of the blackmail. This rape evidence connects Piers with Simbister, and Simbister with Wetron, but we need it all inextricably tied to the bombings before we arrest anyone. Or to put it more accurately, have the police arrest each other!”

“This is enough,” Pitt insisted. “It damns both of them and Piers Denoon. It makes perfect sense.” Tellman’s danger weighed on his mind. Wetron would want him crucified! He would know the papers were gone by now, and he had to know Tellman was responsible, even though he had paid someone else to perform the actual theft. “Simbister owned the
Josephine,
where the dynamite was. Grover works for him. The circle of proof is complete.”

Narraway looked tired and impatient. “This is a dangerous job, Pitt!” He said abrasively. “Ever hunted big game?”

“No, of course not.”

Narraway’s smile was sour. “There are some beasts you only get one shot at. You have to make sure that shot is fatal. Do no more than wound it, and it will turn and crush you, tear you apart, even if it dies afterwards. Wetron is an animal like that.”

“You’ve been big-game hunting?”

Narraway looked straight back at him. “Only for the most dangerous creature of all—man. I have nothing against animals, and no desire to put their heads on my walls.”

Pitt liked him better for that.

“Yes, sir!”

He called on Vespasia briefly, only long enough to tell her about the night’s doings. She responded with a mixture of laughter and grief, and a deep and troubling fear that there might be further tragedy yet to happen. However, she would not tell him of what nature she thought it, nor whom it would involve, although he felt certain she knew.

He left her house and went to St. Paul’s where, at noon, he met Voisey at the tomb of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean clergyman, lawyer, philosopher, adventurer, and poet, John Donne. For once Voisey had little to say about him. A glance at Pitt’s exhausted face, the haste of his step, and the fact that he was ten minutes early, took from him all desire to show off beyond the first remark.

“He entered Oxford University at the age of eleven. Did you know that?” he said wryly. “You look awful. Did you go back to the bombing?”

“No,” Pitt said quietly, keeping his voice low so an elderly couple, also paying a passing reverence to Donne, could not hear him. “I was up most of the night, creating a diversion while a certain burglar took from Wetron’s house a piece of crucial evidence, as you suggested.”

Voisey’s face lit up, his eyes bright. And wide open. “What?”

The eagerness in him had been so intense the elderly couple turned in surprise. The man had been in the middle of quoting perhaps Donne’s most famous words: “therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls…”

“It tolls for thee.” The line finished in Pitt’s mind. “Exactly where you expected,” he said in little more than a whisper.

“For God’s sake!” Voisey snarled. “Who?”

“Piers Denoon. An old charge of rape.”

Voisey let his breath out in a sigh as if a long-held knot had at last unloosed itself. “Is it enough?”

“Almost. We need to be able to prove all the connections. We have the dynamite to Grover, Grover to Simbister, through that confession of Denoon’s, Simbister to Wetron, but Wetron could still deny it. He could say he had only just found that, and intended to act on it when he was certain. It would destroy Simbister, and Wetron would merely replace him with someone else.”

“I see, I see!” Voisey said impatiently. “We must tie Wetron to using Piers Denoon so he can’t escape it. If Denoon shot Magnus Landsborough you can charge him with murder. He’ll be happy to swear he was blackmailed into it. The papers are safe? Where? Not in your house!”

“Yes, they’re safe,” Pitt replied bleakly.

A half smile flashed on Voisey’s face. He had not really expected to be told.

“Use your old Circle connections,” Pitt went on. “We need the proof quickly. Wetron knows we have the papers.”

The half-smile widened. “Does he indeed? I wish I’d seen that.” There was regret in his voice, a hunger to take revenge: to roll it on his tongue, not merely be told about it.

Pitt felt faintly sick. A shiver passed over his skin, but there was no way around working with Voisey, and no point thinking about it as if he could escape. “Use them today,” he said aloud. “Find the proof that Wetron knew of the rape and used it on Denoon to force him into funding the anarchists, then murdering Magnus Landsborough.”

Voisey licked his lips. It was a slow, delicate gesture made without awareness that he was doing it. “Yes,” he said, looking at Pitt. “Yes, I know just who to go to. I still have a few old debts to call in. You have a telephone? Of course you have. Be by it from four o’clock onward. You’re right, there’s no time to waste.” He gave a very slight shrug, an inch, no more. “For Tellman’s sake!”

Pitt gave him the number of his telephone, then turned and walked away, his footsteps rapping on the stone, before he gave in to the impulse to hit Voisey’s subtle, smiling face. He was perfectly aware that they were on the brink of success, and it could all still go wrong. Voisey could betray him; destroy Wetron with the evidence, and Simbister; disgrace Edward Denoon through his son; and save enough from the ashes to step back into his old place in the Inner Circle. Perhaps he could even use the bill in Parliament to his own ends. And there was nothing Pitt could do to prevent that. He knew it, and he could see in his eyes that Voisey knew it too. Voisey was savoring it, as one does a hundred-year-old brandy: breathing the aroma, letting it dizzy your senses.

Pitt was at home at four o’clock, waiting, pacing the floor, starting at every sound. Charlotte was watching him. Gracie was banging around with a mop, muttering to herself, because she knew there was danger, and no one had told her what it was. She had not seen Tellman alone for two days. Pitt said Tellman had acted with extraordinary courage and intelligence, but would not elaborate, even to Charlotte.

At five o’clock they had tea, drinking it quickly, and too hot, wanting cake and then not wanting it.

It was quarter to six when the telephone finally rang. Pitt charged to the hall and picked the receiver off its hook.

“Yes?”

“Got it,” Voisey said jubilantly. “But Denoon has been warned. He’s at the docks already. Come as fast as you can. King’s Arms Stairs on the Isle of Dogs, at Rotherhithe on the south. It’s Limehouse Reach…”

“I know where it is!” Pitt snapped.

“Come now!” Voisey urged. “Fast as you can. I’ll go ahead. If we lose him, we’ve lost it all.”

“Coming.” Pitt replaced the phone, swung around to look at Charlotte and Gracie staring at him. “I’m going to the King’s Arms Stairs on the Isle of Dogs, to get Piers Denoon, before he escapes. Wetron must have warned him.” And he started for the door.

“You can’t arrest him!” Charlotte called after him. “You aren’t police anymore. Let me call…”

“No!” he shouted. “No one! You don’t know who to trust. Tell Narraway, if you can find him. No one else!”

She nodded. It was clear in her face she knew not even to try to reach Tellman. He kissed her so swiftly it was barely a touch, then went out of the house and sprinted to the end of the street. He hailed the first hansom that passed him. “Mill-wall Dock!” he called to the driver. “Then the King’s Arms Stairs. Know it?”

“Yes, sir!”