Treachery at Lancaster Gate (25 page)

“He said so?”

“Yes.”

“And of course you believe him!” Now Lessing's voice was derisive again. “Isn't that a little…gullible…sir?”

“Well, Lezant didn't have it,” Pitt pointed out. “His possessions were carefully listed when he was arrested, on the spot! The gun, a pocket handkerchief, one pound, seventeen shillings and sixpence in change. No money to buy opium, and no opium itself. If there was no one else there, no dealer, no companion, where was the money, or the opium?”

“Tyndale…” The moment he had said it Lessing realized his error.

“Really?” Pitt widened his eyes in amazement. “Did he have the opium, or the money, or both? I wonder why it never turned up. And the police failed to mention it. You did not see fit to inquire into that, I see.”

Lessing was fuming, but the point was just.

“I have no idea. It was two years ago now. Mistakes happen now and then…” he protested.

“Resulting in a man being hanged?” Pitt let all his sarcasm show. “That's rather more than a ‘mistake,' Mr. Lessing. I think you owe a considerable explanation as to why you did not examine it at the time.”

Lessing's mouth drew into a thin, hard line. “Well, if their lordships request it, no doubt we will do what we can,” he said grimly. “In the meantime, I have other work to do.”

Pitt made a note on the bottom of his page, and closed his notebook. “Indeed, as have I,” he answered with a bleak smile. “Quite a lot of it!”

Pitt went to see all of the people Alexander had listed in his attempt to get anyone at all to reconsider Dylan Lezant's case. Few of them were as hostile as Lessing, but the pattern was all the same in the end.

“I felt sorry for him,” Green, the clerk at Hayman's chambers said sadly. “He seemed a decent young man, terribly cut up about his friend's death and sure that he was innocent.” He shook his head. “Hope if I'm ever in trouble I have a friend as loyal. But there wasn't anything we could do. He offered to pay us all he had, which was considerable. But there really were no grounds for appeal. I wish there had been. I would like to have helped him, simply because he was so desperate.”

“There was no merit to the case?” Pitt pressed.

“Legally not. Once a man has been convicted, there has to be a fault in the way the case was conducted, which there was not, or some overwhelming new evidence, which also there was not. I'm sorry.” He looked as if it grieved him. Pitt wondered how many desperate relatives he had had to turn away, people who could not bear to believe that one of their own, a husband, a son, even a wife, could be guilty of a crime so grave they would pay for it with their lives.

All the accounts, compassionate or not, sad or dismissive, even angry, when put together painted a picture of a lonely young man, idealistic, emotional, and in both physical and mental pain, driving himself to exhaustion in the effort to save his friend. And after Lezant's death, he strove at least to retrieve his reputation.

Every name and office that Alexander had given him, Pitt checked and found that he had been there, and in one manner or another had been turned away. Everyone had been either unwilling or unable to help. No one had taken it higher. No one had felt the need to reconsider the issue or question the police report.

Should they have questioned further, reexamined the facts, questioned the witnesses again? Lessing, definitely. He had chosen to believe the easiest account and ignore the inconsistencies. At the other end of the spectrum, Green had regretted the fact that he could do nothing. The loopholes were with the police, possibly with the conduct of the case, but not with the law itself.

By the end of the third day Pitt was sitting beside the fire in his own parlor, weighing up all he knew. It had begun at the level of the five police: Ednam, Newman, Hobbs, Yarcombe, and Bossiney. It had been covered up by those immediately above, and questioned by no one.

Where else was such a thing happening? That was a question he would much rather not have to ask, but it was now unavoidable.

He was thinking of this when there was a knock on the front door. Since Charlotte was upstairs talking to Jemima, Pitt answered and found Jack Radley on the doorstep. He was wearing a heavy winter overcoat and yet his shoulders were hunched, spoiling his usual highly fashionable appearance.

Pitt let him in, took his coat and hat and hung them in the hall, then invited him into the parlor. He offered him whisky rather than tea, but Jack declined it anyway. He sat in Charlotte's chair by the fire, his feet close to the hearth. He came straight to the point of his visit.

“You'll remember that I have been working with Godfrey Duncannon on this contract for a British free port on the China coast…?” he began.

Pitt nodded without interrupting.

Jack smiled with bleak humor. “I haven't forgotten my past misjudgments of character. Only a fool gets caught in the same mistake twice, and I would expect to be thrown out if I do it again. It may be totally trivial, and I'm being too easily alarmed. I suppose that's as bad a fault in the opposite direction. But there are small things that worry me. If I speak to you, is it in confidence?”

Pitt could see the tension in him, very little hidden by his attempt at lightness.

“Of course it is. But if I have to act, I can't guarantee that no one will guess my source. What is it that disturbs you?”

“Emily noticed it before I did,” Jack said almost as an apology. “Duncannon and Josiah Abercorn are both very keen for this contract to succeed, for different reasons. For Duncannon it would be the crowning achievement of his career. For Abercorn, who is at least twenty years younger, it would be an investment that would probably make his fortune for the rest of his life and guarantee his political career, with a good deal of independence. He's well on the way to getting a safe seat in Parliament.”

Pitt was puzzled. “You don't need Emily to tell you that. What bothers you?”

Jack looked down at his hands. “I used to think that it was just a difference in age, and social background. Abercorn has no family to speak of, only a mother, who is now dead…”

“The point, Jack,” Pitt reminded him.

“Abercorn hates Duncannon.” He raised his head again. “Hate is a very extreme word, but I mean it. Emily noticed it. I didn't take it seriously at first, but once she told me, I started to see it in small things. It sounds petty, but it builds up. A tone of voice, a facial expression when he assumes no one is looking at him, double-edged remarks that seem civil until you realize the alternative meaning. I thought at first that he was just less sophisticated with words, until I caught the look in his eyes, the slight sneer, gone the instant he knows you are looking at him. I know, it sounds absurd. But Abercorn knows I've seen it, and now he avoids me, and he's much more careful when the three of us are in the same discussion.”

“Is Duncannon aware of it? Does he feel the same?”

Jack smiled. “Godfrey Duncannon really doesn't care what anyone else thinks of him, as long as they do what he wishes. And Abercorn is certainly doing that, at least at the moment.”

“People dislike each other for all sorts of reasons,” Pitt pointed out. “Could it be a debt? A woman? Could Duncannon have done something as simple as blackball Abercorn from some club he wants to, or needs to, be a member of? People can care passionately about these things. It matters a lot to a social or political career. And usually those two are linked. They shouldn't be, but they are.”

“Not dislike, Thomas,” Jack corrected. “I wouldn't give a damn about that. I don't trust Abercorn. There's malice in him, a deep pain. I can't help thinking he knows something about Duncannon that I don't, and when it suits him, he's going to use it. I would love it if you could tell me for certain that I'm wrong.”

“What are you afraid of, Jack? Specifically?”

Jack took a deep breath. “That Abercorn knows something about these bombings, and he'll produce it when it can most damage Duncannon.”

“Alexander's guilty,” Pitt said quietly. “But I think you already know that as well as I do. Isn't that why you asked me to delay arresting him until the contract is signed?”

“Yes. But my fear is that it goes deeper than that; I'm not sure how. Abercorn is championing the dead police as the victims of anarchy and lawlessness. He's calling for revenge on those who were attacking the very defense against crime that everyone relied on. Some of his most outspoken remarks even suggest that to fail in support for the law, and those who represent it, is to invite anarchy, even to give support to revolution.

“In one article he says that the specific duty of Special Branch is to safeguard the security of the Crown and the nation,” Jack continued. “He asks if you are involved in the Lancaster Gate bombing case precisely because, through attacking the police and insidiously by speaking of corruption, there is a thinly veiled prologue to revolution by violence. He likens it to the revolution that all but destroyed France in 1789.”

“For heaven's sake—” Pitt began.

But Jack overrode him. “The fact that we are now at the beginning of the last year of this century was not lost on most of his readers,” he added. “There are more than enough eccentrics, even lunatics, predicting the end of the world, without men otherwise respected adding to the hysteria. Be realistic, Thomas. Men don't invest fortunes if they don't expect to gain something, either even more money, or value of some other sort. Are you sure Alexander committed this atrocity? Absolutely sure…and on his own?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why? Because he's dissolute, and addicted to opium?” Jack leaned forward earnestly. “He lost his way—no one is arguing that—but he's a decent man, underneath the eccentricity and the pain. Perhaps he got in with some bad people. Godfrey says Lezant was a pretty good rotter. Considering what happened to him, that much seems unarguable. He must have been off his head with the opium, or why else would he have shot a completely innocent passerby?”

“Is that what Godfrey Duncannon says?” Pitt was curious. He had not spoken to Alexander's father, nor did he intend to, on that subject. “Easiest thing to blame the friend,” he agreed. “I might do the same, if it were my son. It's not what Alexander himself says.”

Jack shook his head sharply. “For heaven's sake, Thomas! He's lonely, shut out of the sort of career and society he would have had if he were able to follow in his father's steps. Unfortunately he fell in with a really bad one in young Lezant.”

There was some truth in what Jack said, but only a little, and even that was irrelevant now.

“Whether Lezant was guilty or not doesn't change anything if Alexander set the bomb in Lancaster Gate,” Pitt pointed out. “Yes, he is young and quixotic. He was over-loyal. He refuses to believe that Lezant was guilty. Have you considered the possibility that he was actually there, and he saw what happened? Maybe he isn't guessing. Perhaps he
knows
that Lezant wasn't guilty. Then trying to save him wasn't quixotic. It was simply the decent thing to do.”

“Lezant was tried and convicted,” Jack argued.

“And juries are infallible?”

“Do you think this one was wrong? Come on, Thomas! Five police, all lying? Two opium addicts, one of whom probably wasn't even there! Who do you believe?”

“There is police corruption, Jack, and it's a lot deeper than I thought.”

“To the level of shooting a bystander, then lying to get another man hanged for it?” Jack said with open disbelief.

“Yes, it looks that way,” Pitt replied. Then a sudden weariness overtook him, filling him with grief. “It's more than that, Jack, it's a creeping dishonesty. This didn't happen suddenly. Good men don't turn bad overnight. There were small thefts, a few shillings here and there: lies to cover a man's incompetence, absence without explanation, being drunk on duty, losing evidence, threatening a witness, turning a blind eye when it suited them, using more violence than necessary to arrest someone or get a statement. None of them alone is terrible, but added up, they are. And, in this case, it looks as if someone lost his self-control, panicked, and then found he'd shot Tyndale, the passerby. The only way out of it was to arrest Lezant, put the gun next to him, and say that Tyndale either was the dealer or Lezant thought he was.”

“Why the hell would Lezant shoot his own dealer?” Jack asked.

“He wouldn't. He didn't,” Pitt agreed.

“Where was Alexander?”

“They both ran for it, he was faster and got away. Or perhaps Lezant deliberately covered for him. It would explain even more powerfully why Alexander is willing to pay such a high price to clear Lezant's name. From all I can find, he tried to his wits' end to clear Lezant at the time. Nobody believed that Alexander was even there.” He disliked what he said next, but he still said it. “I don't think Lezant's father was anyone of note. Godfrey Duncannon certainly is. Perhaps no one wanted to lay the blame at that door, if they could find an easier one. Alexander would hate him for that.”

A sudden tightness filled Jack's face, then with an effort he dismissed it. “I…don't know,” he confessed, the conviction suddenly seeping out of him.

But it was too late. “Yes, you do,” Pitt told him. “I've watched Alexander's face when his father's name is mentioned. He may well suspect that he got off because of his father's name, even if Godfrey never actually said anything. If you're powerful enough, you don't have to.”

There were several conflicting emotions in Jack's face. A momentary tenderness was replaced by anger, then guilt. Was he thinking of his daughter, Evangeline, so like Emily, so quick, so admiring of her father? What would Jack do to save her, if he had to?

What would Pitt do to save his children? How can you ever know, unless you are tested?