Pentecost Alley (31 page)

Drummond swung around to exchange a few words with Charlotte and compliment Caroline on Joshua’s performance, then he excused himself and left.

Pitt turned to Cornwallis and was about to resume their conversation when there was another brief tap on the door and Vespasia sailed in with her head high. She looked marvelous. She had chosen to make a great occasion of the event, and was dressed in lavender and steel-gray silk. On anyone else it might have been cold, but with her silver hair and the diamonds at her ears and throat, it was magnificent.

Pitt and Cornwallis automatically rose to their feet.

“Quite fascinating, my dear,” Vespasia said to Caroline. “What an entrancing man. Such a presence.”

Caroline blushed, realized she was doing it, and blushed the more.

“Thank you,” she said almost hesitantly. “I think he is doing it rather well.”

“He is doing it superbly,” Vespasia admonished. “The part could have been written for him. I daresay it was! Good evening, Charlotte. Good evening, Thomas. No doubt you are pleased with yourself? Good evening, John.”

“Good evening, Lady Vespasia.” He bowed very slightly to her. He looked at once pleased and uncomfortable. Pitt glanced at him, and saw from his expression that he was already aware that Vespasia was in some distant way related at least to Charlotte. He was not surprised to see her, as he must otherwise have been.

“Quite extraordinary,” Vespasia went on, with a very slight lift of one shoulder and without offering any explanation of what she was referring to. She turned back to Caroline with a charming smile. “I’m so glad I came. Please don’t consider it in the slightest way a reflection on the fact that the alternative was the opera, which was something Wagnerian and fearfully portentous, to do with gods and destiny. I prefer my doomed love affairs in Italian, and to do with human frailty, which I understand, rather than fate, which I do not, and predestination, which I do not believe in. I refuse to. It negates all that humanity is, if it is to be worth anything whatever.”

Caroline opened her mouth to say something polite and changed her mind. It was not necessary, and no one, least of all Vespasia, expected it.

“And I could not abide to sit and watch Augustus FitzJames preen himself,” Vespasia continued. “I don’t know whether he is really fond of Wagner or only considers it the correct mark of good taste, but he attends every one, and always on the first night, with his wife wearing half a South African diamond mine ’round her neck. The sight of his face would be worse than sitting in a box listening to Brünnhilde screaming for four hours, or Sieglinde, or Isolde, or whoever it is. But it would be interesting to look around the audience and see if anyone is in a particularly filthy mood.”

“Would it?” Pitt said confusedly.

She looked at him with shadowed silver eyes. “Well, my dear Thomas, someone has tried very hard to ruin Mr. FitzJames’s family and has apparently failed. That wretched little man Costigan may have killed the girl, but do you really suppose it was his own idea to implicate young FitzJames? Where on earth would such a man acquire a club badge and a cuff link with which to do it? Do you imagine they could be acquainted?” She did not ask it sarcastically. She was considering the possibility.

“I don’t know,” Pitt replied. “It doesn’t seem likely, but there is a lot yet unanswered. I’m going back to question him again tomorrow. From what we have at the moment, it doesn’t seem to make sense that Finlay FitzJames had anything to do with it at all, either directly or indirectly.”

“Then how did his badge and cuff link get there?” Charlotte asked curiously. “Do you suppose Ada stole them?”

“I don’t know,” Pitt repeated. “Perhaps Finlay left them behind some other time, or someone else did.” Jago Jones’s face flitted into his mind with a sharp, unhappy thought.

“I wish I felt it was purely a mischance,” Vespasia said
with a little shake of her head. “At least I think I do. I really find Augustus FitzJames one of the most displeasing men I have ever known. There is much in him I can understand, but he has the soul of a bully.”

There was a faint tinkling of a warning bell. Here and there a box door opened. A dozen women moved in a drift of colored silks. A score of men rose to their feet, and slowly the audience began to make their way back to their seats. The noise of chatter dropped to an intermittent hum.

Vespasia smiled. “It has been delightful to see you, but for once I have come to the theater principally to see the performance. I intend to be seated when the curtain rises again.” And she bade them all farewell and left in a rustle of shadow-dark silk and the scent of jasmine.

Cornwallis sat down again and turned to Pitt.

“We need to know where those possessions of FitzJames came from and how they got to Ada’s room,” he said just above a whisper. “Now that Costigan is charged, FitzJames is going to want to know who tried to implicate him and whether they used Costigan or not. Your job isn’t over, I’m afraid.” He frowned and leaned a little closer as the lights went down. “It was a pretty wild
chance
, implying FitzJames was in a place like Pentecost Alley. How did he even know he couldn’t account for his time? Most young men of his age and station spend their evenings in company. The chance that he was alone, and couldn’t remember where he was, was … God knows … one in a hundred!”

He dropped his voice even lower as the curtain rose on the stage. “I have a very unpleasant feeling, Pitt, that it was someone close to him. And you had better find out, if you can, which of the two badges was the original.” He sighed. “And if Finlay had the second one made, or his father did continue to overlook it, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.” His tone was sharp with anger and regret. He did not need to say how deeply he hated the compromise of his principles it required.

Further conversation was prevented by the necessity of courtesy that he watch the second act. Not to have done so would have hurt Caroline. They settled down to enjoy it, Charlotte glancing at Pitt, her eyes anxious, Caroline absorbed in the stage, and Cornwallis sitting back, his brow smoothed out, the Pentecost Alley case temporarily set aside.

“I dunno!” Costigan said desperately. “I dunno anyfink abaht it!”

He was sitting in his cell in Newgate and Pitt was standing by the door staring at him, trying to fathom whether he was speaking the truth or still lying—either by habit or with some hope of evading punishment. It was pointless. He would hang for having killed Ada. Anything else would simply be for the record, to solve the remaining mystery.

His dejected figure was hunched up and seemed far smaller without his well-cut clothes and crisp shirt. He wore an old gray jacket now and it was rumpled, as if he had not bothered to hang it up while he slept. Looking at him, Pitt found it hard to be brutal and tell him the truth, which was foolish. He must know it. There could never have been any other outcome, once he had admitted seeing the boots. He was caught, and he had understood that, with all it meant, when he had seen Pitt’s face and realized his own admission.

Even so, there was something of a different level of reality once it was put into words. All hope was killed, even the faint whisper thread of denial, of not having faced it yet.

“I dunno,” Costigan repeated, staring at the ground between his feet. “I never saw the bleedin’ badge, or the cuff link. I swear ter Gawd.”

“The cuff link was down the back of the chair,” Pitt agreed. “But the badge was underneath her body, on the bed. Come on, Costigan! How long could it have lain
there without anyone noticing it? The thing had a pin on it half an inch long, and it was unfastened.”

Costigan’s head came up. “So it were ’er last customer! Stands ter reason. ’Ow do I know ’ow it got there? Mebbe ’e showed it to ’er? Or she were braggin’ as ’ow she nicked it, and were showin’ it ter ’im!”

Pitt thought about it for a moment. The first suggestion was not likely, simply because it required the extraordinary coincidence of someone’s placing Finlay’s belongings in Ada’s room the very night she was murdered, and by Costigan, without premeditation. Costigan’s discovery of her cheating, and his loss of temper, could not have been foreseen.

Or could they? Could someone possibly have paid Fat George to tell Costigan that day, specifically? And then watched Costigan to see what he would do, followed him back to Whitechapel and …

“Wot?” Costigan demanded, watching Pitt’s face. “Wot is it? Wot d’yer know?”

No. No one of power and intelligence, no matter how they hated FitzJames, would place themselves into the hands of Fat George by using him in such a way. It was far too convoluted, depending on too many people: Fat George, Costigan himself, and some other person to place the evidence. No one would take that risk.

“Nothing,” he said aloud. “Did Ada steal? You suggested maybe she was showing the badge to someone. Didn’t you teach her not to steal? It’s dangerous. Bad for business.”

Costigan stared up at him, his skin white, eyes frightened.

“Yeah, course I did. But that don’t mean she always listened, do it? I taught her not to cheat neither, but she still did. Stupid cow!” His face filled with regret, which was more than self-pity. There was a genuine sadness in it. Perhaps old Madge was right and he had been attracted to Ada himself, perhaps even fond of her. That would have made her betrayal hurt the more, a personal
issue, not just a financial one. It would explain why his temper had been so violent, the sense of having the emotions he gave so rarely twisted and turned against him. It was truly a domestic affair.

“Did you ever know her to steal before?” Pitt asked, the edge of anger gone from his voice.

Costigan was staring at the floor again. “No. No, she were smart, Ada were, too smart to steal from a customer. Treated ’em well, she did. Lot of ’em came reg’lar. She were fun. Made ’em laugh. She ’ad class.” Tears spilled over his eyes and ran down his cheeks. “She were good, the stupid bitch. I liked ’er. She should never ’a’ cheated me. I were good ter ’er. Why’d she make me do it? Now she’s finished both o’ us.”

Pitt was sorry. It was a stupid, futile tragedy of greed and wounded feelings, the ungoverned temper of a foolish man whose ambitions outstripped his ability. And both of them had been used by a cleverer and crueler man in Fat George, and perhaps an even subtler and more callous man beyond him.

“Do you know FitzJames?” he asked.

“No …” Costigan was too sunk in his misery to be angry. He did not even look up. He was no longer interested.

“Did anyone ever mention him to you? Think!”

“No one ’cept you,” Costigan said wearily. “Wot is it with you an’ FitzJames? I dunno ’ow ’is things got inter Ada’s place. Somebody stole ’em an’ left ’em there, I s’pose. ’Ow do I know? Go ask ’is friends, or ’is enemies. I only know it in’t me.”

And Pitt could get no more from him. There was no punishment he could possibly receive worse than that for which he was already destined. And there was no reward that would be of the slightest use to him now. Apart from that, Pitt believed him that he had no further knowledge.

He left Newgate and walked out of the humid stone building into the heat of the August afternoon. But it was a long time before the sense of chill left him, the deep
coldness inside from the presence of despair and unreachable misery.

By half past five he was back in Devonshire Street and requesting the cheerful butler for the opportunity to speak to Mr. Finlay FitzJames. He was granted it immediately, and was conducted over yards of finely polished parquet floor into the library, where both Finlay and Augustus were sitting near the open window which looked onto the garden. Past the tangle of honeysuckle flowers and stems, it was easy to see a glimpse of pale muslin as Tallulah pushed herself gently back and forth in a swing seat, her eyes closed, her face up towards the sun in a most unfashionable manner. No wonder her complexion had far more color than was deemed fit.

“Something further, Superintendent?” Augustus said curiously. He closed his book, a heavy tome whose lettering was too small for Pitt to read upside down, and left it on his lap, as though to resume any moment.

“Very little,” Pitt replied, glancing at Finlay, who was watching him with interest. Now that Costigan had been arrested and charged, he was completely relaxed, almost arrogant again. He was very casually dressed, his thick hair brushed back from his face in heavy waves, his expression polite and confident.

“Then why have you come, Mr. Pitt?” he asked, looking up without moving or offering Pitt a seat. “We know nothing whatsoever about the whole miserable business; which, if you remember, is what we told you in the first instance. I’m sure neither my father nor I wish to be informed detail by detail of your progress, or lack of it. It is all very pedestrian, and rather shabby.”

“It is shabby,” Pitt agreed, resenting Finlay’s arrogance bitterly, almost as if he himself had not despised Costigan just as much. He sat down uninvited. “But it is not pedestrian,” he added. “It is most unusual.”

“Is it?” Finlay’s eyebrows rose. “I would have thought
prostitutes were quite often beaten or killed, especially in the East End.”

Pitt had difficulty in controlling his voice so it did not show. The indifference to death infuriated him: anyone’s death, Ada’s, Costigan’s, anyone’s at all.

“That sort of motive is quite common, Mr. FitzJames.” He tried to speak unemotionally, but he could not keep the shadow of sarcasm out of his voice. “But it is extraordinary to find at the scene of such a murder the personal possessions of a man like yourself, when you have no connection whatever with the victim or with the crime.”

“Well, as you now know, Superintendent, I do have no connection with it.” Finlay was smiling, his eyes bright. “It was her own pimp. I thought we had agreed that was beyond question. If you’ve come here to ask me how a badge, which looks like mine, came to be there, I had no idea in the beginning, and I still have no idea.”

Pitt clenched his teeth.

“And does that not bother you, sir?” he asked, staring levelly at Finlay’s handsome face and wide, complacent gaze. “The badge was in the bed, with the pin open. It could not have been there more than a very short time, half an hour at the very most.”