The Angel Court Affair (Thomas Pitt 30) (27 page)

‘As far as opportunity – they all vouch for each other, and why wouldn’t they? If one of them did it, they’re likely all in it, or got reason to cover for whoever it is. If you ask me, they’re all a bit touched. But not more than a lot of lonely people, or those that never quite fitted in. But whatever they were, they didn’t deserve this.’

Pitt did not argue. He thanked Latham and took his leave.

Outside it was a brisk and windy day. People on foot were walking quickly, one or two women clutching at hats with brims that lifted and threatened to blow away.

Pitt was deep in thought, grateful for Latham’s co-operation. The police did not always work easily with Special Branch. They felt a clash of jurisdiction and as if they were left with the worst to do while others took the credit.

He had reached the kerb of the main thoroughfare when he became aware of Frank Laurence beside him.

‘A little desperate, are we?’ Laurence said cheerfully. ‘Kidnapper not asked for a ransom yet? That doesn’t look good. Don’t suppose they accidentally killed her, do you? She looked like the sort of woman who would put up a good fight.’

Pitt stopped abruptly and swung around to face him, aching to wipe the smirk off his face.

‘This is not a game!’ he said furiously. ‘She is a human being with people she loves, dreams and beliefs just like the rest of us. She’s not some figure of your imagination you can manipulate to sell more of your damn newspapers!’

Laurence’s eyes widened, but he was not in the least taken off balance. Pitt realised in that instance that Laurence had said what he had precisely to provoke Pitt into losing his temper. Angry men make mistakes, say more than they mean to.

‘You really are afraid she’s dead!’ Laurence said softly. ‘Ransom too high, is it?’

‘I didn’t say there was a ransom at all,’ Pitt snapped, starting to walk rapidly across the street.

‘You don’t need to, my dear chap. It is in your face.’ Laurence kept pace. ‘Money? Lots of it? Perhaps the noble Mr Teague will come up with it? That would really make him a hero, wouldn’t it? I can see the headlines now! Dalton Teague pays a king’s ransom to save the life of a Spanish saint whose every word he disagrees with! Perhaps he kidnapped her in the first place, so he could rescue her in public? Pay his fortune back to himself. Do you suppose there is some insurance that would cover it?’

‘Why don’t you write it and find out?’ Pitt suggested tartly. ‘Except that of course Teague would ruin you.’

‘Indeed,’ Laurence said with a twisted smile. ‘That is exactly what he would do. And I wouldn’t be the first. You should think of that, Mr Pitt. Take a good look at Dalton Teague’s career, and what has happened to those who stood up against him.’

‘Did you?’ Pitt asked, wondering why Laurence hated Teague so much. ‘Did you stand up to him, and suffer for it? Is that what this is really about?’

‘It’s about Sofia Delacruz, and whoever murdered Cleo and Elfrida,’ Laurence answered. ‘Isn’t it?’ He gave a slight shrug. ‘Or is it about terrorism, and the war between Spain and America, and whether it eventually draws everybody else into it, and becomes a world war? And if it does, which side are we on?’

Pitt considered evading the issue, and decided it would be pointless. Laurence knew as well as he did that was the fear behind everything else.

‘Have you got anything helpful to say?’ he asked instead.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have,’ Laurence retorted. ‘You might look into the relationship between Teague and Barton Hall. They know each other a great deal better than either seems to have told you. A peculiar omission, in the circumstances.’

‘You said that before,’ Pitt agreed. ‘They were at the same school, at the same time. As were you, which you rather neatly evaded when we spoke about it before, yet you talk about Teague at every opportunity.’

Laurence raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you ever been on a school sports team, Pitt? Or a college team? Do you know the kind of loyalty that creates? Do you know how sports teams are worshipped by others, especially those who almost always win? What it is to be part of the “in” circle?’ His face darkened. ‘Or what it is like to be the swot, the one who doesn’t hit the ball, doesn’t score the runs?’ There was a bitter edge to his voice. ‘And yet you can pass the exams . . . can’t you? You can do the maths, write the essays, even understand and remember the lessons of history. Wasn’t it the Duke of Wellington who said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton?’

He looked quizzically at Pitt. ‘A lot of things are won and lost on school playing fields, Pitt. You might remember that!’ And with a little mock salute he turned and walked away, leaving Pitt standing on the pavement, trying to see order in the confusion. He could not pin it down, but there was something there, something to do with Teague and Spain, and Laurence intended Pitt to find it.

Dalton Teague was brought to Pitt’s mind again within the hour. He returned to Lisson Grove to find Stoker fuming with anger. His bony face was white and he was so stiff he refused to sit down.

‘His damn men are everywhere!’ he said as soon as Pitt was through the door. ‘Now he’s got Russell eating out of his hand. It’s Teague this, and Teague that! Doesn’t listen to me any more! And what’s the result? Gone careering off up to Nottingham on a false trail. Turns out the woman’s a damn gypsy. No more Sofia Delacruz than I am.’

It was not the first time Special Branch had followed a lead that turned out to be useless. Rather a lot of them had come through Teague, but their own had been no better.

‘Papers got it?’ Pitt asked, walking past Stoker and sitting down at his desk. He saw the pile of reports on it and realised how much was being set aside because of Sofia’s disappearance. He hardly even recalled the details of the sabotage in the London factories. Dalton Teague’s meddling, his pronouncements to the press, were all keeping it at the forefront of people’s minds so imaginations were running wild.

Was Teague being manipulated by someone far cleverer than he? That possibility had crossed Pitt’s mind lately. Did they look at this handsome man with his grace and his connections, and play on his hunger for adulation? Could it all be a sleight of hand, and Pitt was taking the bait?

Or was Laurence trying to lead him into finding some fact about Teague that held a real meaning?

Current unrest was mild in Britain, compared with the rest of Europe. Even in the United States they were having troubles of protest and unease, a new class of urban poor uniting and demanding privileges previously unthought of. There had been very considerable violence. Was it building up here too, but Pitt was too busy being a policeman, and bent on one problem as he used to be in his Bow Street days, and so was blind to the greater picture? Narraway had warned him.

Now Narraway was in Spain, and Pitt had heard nothing from him yet.

‘Russell’s a good man,’ he said aloud. ‘Tell him not to be such a damn fool. Take a look at those reports,’ he waved towards the papers on his desk. ‘I’m going to find Teague and tell him to lower the profile.’

‘He won’t do that,’ Stoker said flatly. ‘He’s like a hard-mouthed horse with the bit between his teeth. I don’t know what you think you’ll achieve.’

‘I don’t expect to change his mind,’ Pitt replied with a tight smile. ‘I want to learn a bit more about him, see if I can work out what he knows, and what he’s really trying to do.’

Stoker’s eyes widened. ‘D’you think he has anything to do with her disappearance, sir? That would mean he knows who killed the two women. It’s the sort of thing anarchists do, but I can’t see him as an anarchist. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool aristocrat. Generations of privilege behind him. Probably got ancestors back to the Norman Conquest!’ He said it with an air of disgust.

‘We all have, Stoker, just that his were on horseback and yours and mine were on foot, and on the wrong side,’ Pitt observed. ‘And no, I don’t think for a moment that he’s intentionally with anarchists. Teague is with Teague, and a man like that can be used.’

‘Yes, sir!’ Stoker was already sitting at Pitt’s desk and beginning to go through the piles of paper by the time Pitt reached the door, then turned round. ‘And Stoker!’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Find out if Teague has any connections in Spain, will you? Any at all.’

‘You think he has?’ Stoker said with surprise.

‘I don’t know. Just something Frank Laurence said.’

Pitt reached Teague in the quiet lounge in one of the gentlemen’s clubs. Teague leaned back in the armchair, stretching out his long legs, ankles crossed, staring up at Pitt, a crystal sherry glass in his hand.

‘Dear fellow, good to see you,’ he said with a casual smile. ‘Do sit down. Can I have the steward bring you a glass of sherry? I can recommend the Amontillado.’

Pitt knew perfectly well that the phrasing of the invitation was intended to leave Pitt uncertain if he was being offered the sherry, or expected to pay for it himself. He was not a member of the club, although Narraway had persuaded him into the necessity of belonging to a couple of others. It had nothing to do with the cachet of social acceptance, but rather a matter of who was confiding in whom, who was in and who out; a kind of observation too subtle to be passed on in the words of a junior. It was a matter of putting pieces together from the memory, understanding an implication when the final bit of evidence was seen. Sometimes it was as subtle as a tone of voice, the lifting of an eyebrow, the omission of something, two people avoiding leaving at the same time so it might be assumed they were not close.

‘No, thank you,’ Pitt replied. ‘A little early for me.’

Teague smiled, but his eyes were cold. ‘Very right of you,’ he agreed. ‘I’m afraid you have a long way to catch up, and no doubt a great many other issues to take care of. We have an increasingly dangerous situation.’ He moved to uncross his legs and recross them the opposite way. ‘I admit, I am beginning to appreciate rather more just how enormous Special Branch’s task is. How on earth do you keep track of it all? It is sort of . . . amorphous! Thousands of people across Europe are restless, looking for a way to lash out at authority. You can’t possibly watch all of them. How do you know which one is revelling in the sound of his own voice, and which will actually throw a bomb one day?’ He looked interested, his head a little to one side, the late sunlight through the window creating a halo around his magnificent hair.

‘Most of them are not my problem,’ Pitt said with a smile, sitting down opposite him, almost as much at ease, at least on the surface. ‘It is largely their own leaders they want to blow up rather than ours.’

‘That’s your answer?’ Teague said incredulously. ‘It’s not your problem!’

Pitt realised his flippancy was going to be turned against him, very rapidly, if he were not more careful. ‘We watch and observe,’ he replied levelly, holding Teague’s eye. ‘We warn other governments, if we learn anything they should know. As they warn us.’

‘How do you know they are telling the truth?’ Teague pressed.

‘We don’t. We file it away, and make our own judgements.’

Teague’s eyebrows rose. ‘You must have a memory like an elephant, keeping all those thousands of lists so you can put them together and see some sense. That’s what one of your fellows told me. You can make any picture you want out of most of them. Takes a very clever man to make the right one.’ He looked as if he were half asleep, even a little drunk, but Pitt noticed that his hand around the stem of his glass was rock steady and under the drooping lids his eyes were needle-sharp.

‘One gets used to certain shapes,’ Pitt answered. ‘Quite often it’s the one piece that doesn’t fit that makes you see the picture’s real shape.’

‘How interesting,’ Teague murmured. He put up his hand to catch the steward’s attention and the man was at his side in moments.

‘Yes, Mr Teague, sir? May I bring you something?’

‘Thank you, Hythe. Commander Pitt is still engaged in business. May we have a pot of tea?’ He turned to Pitt. ‘Do you prefer China, or Indian?’

‘Indian, thank you,’ Pitt accepted. He would definitely enjoy a cup of tea, or several, but whether he did or not, to refuse would be clumsy.

‘Yes, sir. I’ll bring it immediately.’ Hythe bowed and left.

‘I prefer Indian myself,’ Teague agreed. ‘Back to this likeness of a jigsaw that you mentioned. It is a most vivid analogy. The piece that doesn’t fit, eventually, because you are trying to make the wrong picture out of it. If I understand you rightly – and I have observed your men gathering all kinds of pieces that seem trivial, unrelated – they never ignore any of them. The intelligent ones don’t, anyway. Stoker is a good man, quiet, steady, observant, loyal, and I should think the right man to have beside you in a fight. Does it ever come to that?’

‘Very seldom. It’s usually a bit late by then.’ Pitt tried to lean back as casually as Teague did. He would never be as elegant, but he knew how to look at ease.

‘All the same, there must be times when it counts. Although speed and strength will never surpass intelligence.’ Teague was looking at Pitt very steadily. His eyes were as much green as blue. ‘These pieces you collect. For example?’ He ticked them off on his long fingers. ‘Sofia Delacruz is a beautiful woman, lit from within by an extraordinary passion. She is married to a Spaniard who lives in Toledo. She has started this eccentric and absurd new religion, which she seems to believe, and be prepared to cling on to at whatever cost. She left England, and her family, in rebellion against a marriage she did not want. She fell in love with a man who was already married. His wife killed herself, and their children. Sofia has come to England to preach this extraordinary creed. She is upsetting the Establishment. Her only relative, a cousin of sorts, is Barton Hall. She says she wishes to heal the rift between them, yet apparently she does not see him. She makes no moderation in her radical preaching. She disappears, possibly with the connivance of her own people. There are threats against her life, at least some of which have to be taken seriously. Am I correct so far?’

‘Yes.’ Pitt could not argue. ‘What picture are you making of the pieces?’ He was curious to know.