PITT WAS QUITE unaware of Charlotte’s enterprise. He was so preoccupied with his own doubts about the proof of Jerome’s guilt that he accepted at face value her having gone calling with Great-Aunt Vespasia, something that at another time he would have regarded with sensible suspicion. Charlotte had respect and considerable affection for Aunt Vespasia, but she would not have gone calling with her for purely social reasons. It was a circle in which Charlotte had neither place nor interest.
Concern about Jerome tantalized Pitt’s thoughts and made concentration on anything else almost impossible. He performed his other investigations mechanically, so much so that a junior sergeant had to point out to him his oversights, at which Pitt lost his temper, principally because he knew he was at fault, and then had to apologize to the man. To his credit, the man accepted it with grace; he recognized worry when he saw it, and appreciated a senior who could unbend enough to admit fault.
But Pitt knew it for a warning. He must do something more about Jerome or his conscience would intrude further and further until it upset all decent thought and he made some mistake that could not be undone.
Like hanging: that, too, could not be undone. A man imprisoned wrongfully could be released, could begin to rebuild his life. But a man hanged was gone forever.
It was morning. Pitt was sitting at his desk sorting through a pile of reports. He had looked at every sheet and read the words with his eyes, but not a single fraction of their meaning penetrated his brain.
Gillivray was sitting opposite, waiting, staring.
Pitt picked the reports up again and began again at the beginning. Then he looked up. “Gillivray?”
“Yes, sir?”
“How did you find Abigail Winters?”
“Abigail Winters?” Gillivray frowned.
“That’s what I said. How did you find her?”
“Process of elimination, sir,” Gillivray replied a little irritably. “I investigated lots of prostitutes. I was prepared to go through them all, if necessary. She was about twenty-fifth, or something like that. Why? I can’t see that it matters now.”
“Did anyone suggest her to you?”
“Of course they did! How else do you think I find any prostitutes? I don’t know them for myself. I got her name from some of the contacts I got the other names from. I didn’t get hers from anyone special, if that’s what you mean. Look, sir.” He leaned forward over the desk. It was a mannerism that Pitt found particularly irritating. It smacked of familiarity, as if they were professional equals. “Look, sir,” Gillivray said again. “We’ve done our job on the Waybourne case. Jerome has been found guilty by the courts. He was tried fairly, on the testimony of witnesses. And even if you don’t have any time for Abigail Winters or her kind—or, God knows, Albie Frobisher either—you’ve got to admit young Titus Swynford and Godfrey Waybourne are honest and decent youths, and had no possible connection with the prostitutes. To suggest they did is just running into the absurd. The prosecution has to prove guilt beyond all reasonable doubt, not beyond all doubt at all! And with respect, Mr. Pitt, the doubts you are entertaining now are not reasonable. They are farfetched and ridiculous! The only thing lacking was an eyewitness, and nobody commits a clever and premeditated murder in front of witnesses. Hot-blooded killings, yes—out of fear maybe, or temper, or even jealousy. But this was planned and executed with care! Now leave it alone, sir! It’s finished. You’ll only get yourself into trouble.”
Pitt looked at his earnest face above the white collar. He wanted to hate him, and yet he was obliged to admit the advice was fair. If their roles had been reversed, it was just what he would have said. The case was over. It was bending reason to suppose that the truth was other than the obvious. In most crimes there were far more victims than just the immediate person robbed or violated; this time it was Eugenie Jerome—perhaps obscurely even Jerome himself. To expect to be able to tidy up all the injustices was to be childishly simplistic.
“Mr. Pitt?” Gillivray was looking anxious.
“Yes,” Pitt said sharply. “Yes, you are quite right. To suppose that all the people, quite independently of each other, were telling the same lie to incriminate Jerome is quite ridiculous. And to imagine they had anything in common is even more so.
“Exactly,” Gillivray agreed, relaxing a little. “The two prostitutes might, although it is unlikely they even knew each other—there is nothing to indicate they did. But to suppose they had anything in common with a child like Titus Swynford is twisting reason beyond any sense at all.”
Pitt had no argument. He had talked to Titus and he could not imagine him even knowing of the existence of such people as Albie Frobisher, much less having met him and conspired with him. If Titus needed an ally to defend him, he would have chosen someone of his own class, someone he already knew. And frankly, he found it hard to believe Titus had anything for which he needed defense.
“Right!” he said with more anger than he could account for. “Arson! What have we done about this damn fire?”
Gillivray immediately produced a piece of paper from his inside pocket and began to read a string of answers. They provided no solution, but several possibilities that should be investigated. Pitt assigned two of the most promising to Gillivray, and, without realizing it, chose for himself two more that took him to that area on the edge of Bluegate Fields, within half a mile of the brothel where Abigail Winters had a room.
It was a dark day. The streets dripped with a steady, fine rain; gray houses leaned together like sour old men, brooding with complaint, impotent in senility. There was the familiar smell of staleness, and he imagined he could hear the rising tide of the river in the creaking boards and the slow-moving water.
What kind of a person came here for pleasure? Perhaps a tidy little clerk who sat on a high stool all day, dipping his quill in the ink and copying figures from ledger to ledger, keeping accounts of someone else’s money, and went home to a sharp-tongued wife who regarded pleasure as sin and flesh as the tool of the devil.
Pitt had seen dozens of clerks like that, pale-faced, starch-collared, models of rectitude because they dared not be anything else. Economic necessity, together with the need to live by society’s rules, was a total taskmaster.
So people like Abigail Winters made a living.
The arson inquiry proved surprisingly fruitful. To be honest, he had expected Gillivray’s leads to be the real ones, and it gave him a perverse satisfaction when his own turned up the answer. He took a statement, wrote it carefully, and put it in his pocket. Then, since he was only two streets away and it was still early, he walked to the house where Abigail Winters lived.
The old woman at the door looked at him with surprise.
“My, you’re an early one!” she said with a sneer. “Can’t yer let them girls get any sleep?”
“I want to talk to Abigail Winters,” he replied with a slight smile, hoping it would soften her.
“Talk, eh? That’s a new one,” she said with heavy disbelief. “Well, it don’t matter wot yer do—time’s time just the same. Yer pays by the hour.” She held out her hand, rubbing her fingers together.
“Why should I pay you?” He made no move.
“ ’Cause this is my ’ouse,” she snapped. “And if yer wants to come in an’ see one o’ my girls, then yer pays me. Wot’s the matter wiv yer—’aven’t yer never bin ’ere before?”
“I want to talk to Abigail, nothing more, and I have no intention of paying you for that,” he replied sternly. “I’ll talk to her in the street, if necessary.”
“Oh, will yer then, Mr. Fancy?” she said with a hard edge to her voice. “We’ll see abaht that!” And she started to slam the door.
Pitt was very much larger than she was, and stronger. He put his foot next to the frame and leaned on the door.
“ ’Ere!” she said angrily. “You try ter force yer way in ’ere, an’ I’ve got boys as’ll do yer over till yer own muvver won’t knew yer! Yer no beauty now—but yer’ll be a rare sight when they’ve finished, and that’s a promise!”
“Threatening me, are you?” Pitt inquired calmly.
“Now you’ve got it!” she agreed. “An’ I’ll do it yer better believe!”
“That’s a pretty serious offense—threatening a police officer.” He met her sharp old eyes squarely. “I could have you up for that and put in Coldbath Fields for a spell. How would you like that? Fancy picking oakum for a while?”
She paled under the grime on her face.
“Liar!” she spat. “Yer no fuzz!”
“Oh, yes, I am. Investigating a case of arson.” That was true, if not the completely so. “Now where’s Abigail Winters?—before I get unpleasant, and come back with force!”
“Bastard!” she said. But the venom had gone out of her voice, and there was a certain satisfaction underlying it. Her mouth widened into a stump-toothed smile. “Well, you can’t see ’er, Mr. Fuzz—’cause she ain’t ’ere! Left here after that there trial. Gorn to see ’er cousin or suffink, up in the country. An’ it’s no use yer askin’ where to, ’cause I dunno, and nor do I care! Could be any place. If’n yer wants ’er that bad, yer’d better go an’ look.” She gave a dry little laugh. “Course yer can come and search the place—if yer wants?” She pulled the door wider, invitingly. An odor of cabbage and drains hit his nose, but he had smelled it too often before for it to make him sick.
He believed her. And if his persistent, almost silenced suspicions were right after all, it was not unlikely Abigail had gone. All the same, it would be negligent not to make sure.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’ll come and look.” Please God her bullyboys were not inside waiting to beat him in the privacy of this warren of rooms. She might have them do it—just in revenge for the insult. Then, on the other hand, if she believed he was a police officer, such an act would be stupid, even ruinous to her business—a luxury she could most definitely not afford. The very name of Coldbath Fields was enough to sober anyone from the intoxication of revenge.
Pitt followed her inside and along the corridor. The place had a dead look about it, almost unused, like a music hall in daylight when all the tinsel and laughter has gone, and the kindness of concealing shadows.
She opened the rooms for him, one after another. He peered in at the rumpled beds, shabby in the dim light, and girl after girl turned over and stared at him out of blurred eyes, faces still smudged with paint, and swore at him for disturbing them.
“Rozzer come ter take a look atcher,” the old woman said maliciously. “ ’E’s lookin’ fer Abbie. I tell’d ’im she ain’t ’ere, but ’e wants ’er that bad ’e’s come ter look fer ’isself. ’E don’t believe me!”
He did not bother to argue. He had believed her, but he could not afford to take the one chance in a hundred that she was lying. For his own sake, he had to be sure.
“There now!” she said triumphantly at the end. “Believe me now, do yer? Owes me an apologizement, Mr. Rozzer! She ain’t ’ere!”
“Then you’ll have to do instead, won’t you!” he said acidly, and was pleased to see the start of surprise in her face.
“I dunno nuffink! Yer don’t fink no toff comes ’ere and lies wiv me, do yer? Toffs ain’t no diff’rent to no one else wiv their trousers orf! They likes ’em all sorts, ’ceptin’ old.”
Pitt wrinkled his nose at her crudity. “Rubbish!” he said sharply. “You’ve never seen a real gentleman in your life—and certainly not here!”
“It’s wot Abigail said, an’ I ’eard ’er,” the old woman argued, looking at him closely. “An’ said in a court o’ law she did, too. I was read it out o’ the newspapers. Got a girl ’ere wot can read, I ’ave. She was in service till she lost ’er character.”
An idea materialized in Pitt’s mind, suddenly and without warning.
“Did Abigail say it to you before she said it in the court, or afterwards?” he asked quietly.
“Afterwards, the thievin’ little cow!” The old woman’s face creased with anger and outrage. “Wasn’t goin’ ter tell me abaht it, she wasn’t! Goin’ ter keep it all fer ’erself—when I provides ’er room and lodgin’ and protection! Ungrateful bitch!”
“You’re getting careless.” Pitt looked at her with contempt. “Letting a couple of well-heeled gentlemen in here and not collecting your share. And you must have known men dressed like that could pay—and well, too!”
“I never saw them—you fool!” she spat. “Yer fink I’d ’a let ’em walk past me if’n I ’ad, do yer?”
“What’s the matter—fall asleep at your post?” Pitt’s lip curled. “You’re getting too old—you should give it up and let someone with a more careful eye take over. You’re probably being robbed every night of the week.”
“No one comes through this door wivout I knows it!” she shouted at him. “I got you quick enough, Mr. Rozzer!”
“This time,” he agreed. “Any of the other girls see these gentlemen you missed?”
“If they did and didn’t tell me, I’ll ’ave their thievin’ ’ides!”
“You mean you haven’t asked them? My, but you are losing your hold on the game,” he jeered.
“O’ course I arst ’em!” she shouted. “An’ vey didn’t! Nobody takes me for a fool! I’ll ’ave my boys beat the skin orf any girl as takes advantage—and they knows it!”
“But still Abigail did.” He narrowed his eyes. “Or did you have your boys beat her for it already—maybe a little too hard— and she ended up dead in the river? Maybe we should have a better look for Abigail Winters, do you think?”
Her skin went white under the rime of dirt.
“I never touched the thievin’ cow!” she shrieked. “An’ neither did the boys! She gave the ’arf the money and I never touched ’er! She went into the country, I swear on the muvver’s grave! You’ll never prove I ’armed an ’air on ’er ’ead, ’cause I never did—none of us never did.”
“How often did these particular toffs come and see Abigail?”
“Once—as I knows of—just once—that’s wot she said.”
“No, she didn’t. She said they were regular customers.”
“Then she’s a liar! You think I don’t know the own ’ouse?”
“Yes—I’m beginning to think so. I’d like to talk to the rest of your girls, especially this one that can read.”
“You got no right! They ain’t done nuffink!”
“Don’t you want to know if Abigail was stealing you blind, and they were helping her?”
“I can find art the own ways—I don’t need yer ’elp!”
“Don’t you? Seems like you didn’t even know about it at all before.”
Her face narrowed with suspicion. “Wot’s it to you anyway? Why should you care if Abigail cheated me?”
“Nothing at all. But I do care how often those two came here. And I’d like to know if any of your other girls recognize them.” He fished in his pocket and brought out a picture of the suspected arsonist. “That him?”
“Dunno,” she said, squinting at it. “So wot if it is?”
“Fetch me the girl who can read.”
She obeyed, cursing all the way, and brought back a tousle-headed girl, half asleep, still looking like a housemaid in her long white nightshirt. Pitt handed her the picture.
“Is that the man who came to see Abigail, the one who brought the boy she told about in court?”
“You answer ’im, my girl,” the old woman warned. “Or I’ll ’ave Bert tan yer ’ide fer yer till it bleeds, you ’ear me?”
The girl took the picture and looked at it.
“Well?” Pitt asked.
The girl’s face was pale, her fingers shook.
“I don’t know—honest. I never saw them. Abbie just told me about it after.”
“How long after?”
“I dunno. She never said. After it all came out. I s’pose she wanted to keep the money.”
“You never saw them?” Pitt was surprised. “Who did, then?”
“No one that I know of. Just Abbie. She kept them to herself.” She stared at Pitt, her eyes hollow with fear, although he did not know whether it was him she was afraid of or the old woman and the unseen Bert.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, giving her a sad little half smile, all he could afford of pity. To have looked at her closely, thought about her, would have been unbearable. She was only a miniscule part of something he could not change. “Thank you—that was what I wanted to know.”
“Well, I’m damned if I can tell why!” the old woman said derisively. “No use—that is!”
“You’re probably damned anyway,” Pitt replied coldly. “And I’ll have the local rozzers keep an eye on your place—so no beating the girls, or we’ll shut you down. Understand?”
“I’ll beat who the ’ell I want to!” she said, and swore at him, but he knew she would be careful, at least for a while.
Outside in the street, he started back toward the main thoroughfare, and an omnibus that would take him to the station. He did not look for a hansom; he wanted time to think.
Brothels were not private places, and a procuress like the old woman did not allow men to pass in and out without her knowing; she could not afford to. The levy on their passage was her livelihood. If her girls started sneaking in customers and not paying her share of the takings, word would get around and in a month she would be out of business.
So how was it possible that Jerome and Arthur Waybourne had been there and no one had seen them? And would Abigail, with her future to think of, a roof over her head—would she have dared keep a customer secret? Many a girl had been scarred for life for retaining too much of her own earnings. And Abigail had been in the business long enough to know that; she would know of “examples” that had been made of the greedy and the overambitious. She was not stupid; neither was she clever enough to carry off such a fraud, or she would not have been working for that evil old woman.
Which left the question that had been burning at the back of his mind, inching its way forward till it came into sharp, clear focus. Had Jerome and Arthur Waybourne ever been there at all?
The only reason to suppose they had was Abigail’s word. Jerome had denied it, Arthur was dead; and no one else had seen them.
But why should she lie? She had appeared out of nowhere; she had nothing to defend. If Jerome had not been there, then she had had to share with the old woman a good portion of money that she had never received.
Unless, of course, she had received it for something else. For what? And from whom?
For the lie, of course. For saying that Jerome and Arthur Waybourne had been there. But who had wanted her to say that?
The answer would be the name of Arthur’s murderer. Which Pitt now clearly thought was not Maurice Jerome.
But all this conjecture was still not proof. For even a doubt reasonable enough to reopen the case, he must have the name of someone besides Jerome who might have paid Abigail. And of course he would also have to see Albie Frobisher and look a good deal more closely into his testimony.
In fact, he thought, that would be a good thing to do now.
He walked past the omnibus stop, turned the corner, and hurried down the long, drab street. He hailed a hansom and climbed in, shouting directions.
Albie’s rooming house was familiar: the wet matting just past the door, then the bright red beyond, the dim stairs. He knocked on the door, aware that there might be a customer already there. But his sense of urgency would not let him wait to make a more convenient arrangement.
There was no answer.
He knocked again, harder, as if he meant to force it if he were not admitted.
Still there was no reply.
“Albie!” he said sharply. “I’ll push this door in if you don’t answer!”
Silence. He put his ear to the door and there was no sound of movement inside.
“Albie!” he shouted.
Nothing. Pitt turned and ran down the stairs, along the red-carpeted hallway to the back where the landlord had his quarters. This establishment was different from the brothel where Abigail worked. Here there was no procurer guarding the door. Albie paid a high rent for his room; customers came and went in privacy. But then it was a richer, different class of clientele, far more guarded with their secrets. To visit a woman prostitute was an understandable lapse, a little indiscretion that a man of the world turned a blind eye to. To pay for the services of a boy was not only a deviation too disgusting to be condoned, it was also a crime, opening one to all the nightmares of blackmail.
He knocked sharply on the door.
It opened a crack and a bilious eye looked out at him.
“ ’Oo are yer? Wot d’yer want?”
“Where’s Albie?”
“Why d’yer want ter know? If ’e owes yer, it’s nuffin ter do wiv me!”
“I want to talk to him. Now where is he?”
“Wot’s it worf?”
“It’s worth not being run in for keeping a brothel and aiding and abetting in homosexual acts, which are illegal.”
“Yer can’t do vat! I rent aht rooms. Wot vey does in ’em ain’t my fault!”
“Want to prove that to a jury?”
“You can’t arrest me!”
“I can and I will. You might get off, but you’ll have a rough time in jail till you do. People don’t like procurers, especially ones who procure little boys! Now where’s Albie?”
“I dunno! Honest to God, I dunno! ’E don’t tell me where ’e comes an’ goes!”
“When did you see him last? What time does he usually come back—and don’t tell me you don’t know.”
“Abaht six—’e’s always back at abaht six. But I ain’t seen ’im for a couple o’ days. ’E weren’t ’ere last night, and I dunno where ’e went. As God’s me judge! An’ I carn’t tell yer more’n vat if yer was to send me ter Horstralia fer it!”
“We don’t send people to Australia anymore—haven’t done for years,” Pitt said absently. He believed the man. There would be no point in his lying, and he had everything to lose if Pitt chose to harass him.
“Well, Coldbath Fields then!” the man said angrily. “It’s the truth. I dunno where ’e’s gorn! Nor if n ’e’ll be back. I bloody ’ope so—’e owes me this week’s rent, ’e does!” Suddenly he was aggrieved.
“I expect he’ll be back,” Pitt said with a curious sense of misery. Probably Albie would come back. After all, why shouldn’t he? As he had said himself, he had good rooms here and an established clientele. The only other possibility was if he had found some single customer who had developed into a lover, possessive, demanding—and wealthy enough to set him up somewhere for his own exclusive patronage. Such windfalls as that were pipe dreams for boys like Albie.
“So ’e’ll be back!” the landlord said testily. “You plannin’ to stand there in the passageway like a devil’s ’ead till ’e does, then? You’ll scare orf all the—visitors! It ain’t good fer a place to ’ave the likes o’ you standin’ there! Gives a place a bad name. Makes people fink vere’s suffink wrong wiv us!”
Pitt sighed. “Of course not. But I’ll be back. And if you’ve done anything to send Albie away, or any harm has come to him, I’ll have you down to Coldbath Fields quicker than your rotten little feet’ll touch the ground!”
“Fancy ’im, then, do yer?” The old man’s face split in a dirty grin, and he seized the chance to kick Pitt’s foot out of the doorway and slam the door shut.
There was nothing else to do but go back to the police station. Pitt was already late, and he had no business being here.
Gillivray was jubilant about the arsonist, and it was a quarter of an hour before he bothered to ask Pitt what had taken him so long.
Pitt did not want to reply directly with the truth.
“What else do you know about Albie Frobisher?” he asked instead.
“What?” Gillivray frowned as though momentarily the name made no sense to him.
“Albie Frobisher,” Pitt repeated. “What else do you know about him?”
“Else than what?” Gillivray said irritably. “He’s a male prostitute, that’s all. What else is there? Why should we care? We can’t arrest all the homosexuals in the city or we’d do nothing else. Anyway, you’d have to prove it, and how could you do that without dragging in their customers?”
“And what’s wrong with dragging in their customers?” Pitt asked bluntly. “They are at least as guilty, maybe more so. They’re not doing it to live.”
“Are you saying prostitution is all right, Mr. Pitt?” Gillivray was shocked.
Usually hypocrisy enraged Pitt. This time, because it was so totally unconscious, it overwhelmed him with hopelessness.
“Of course I’m not,” he said wearily. “But I can understand how it has come about, at least for many people. Are you condoning those who use prostitutes, even boys?”
“No!” Gillivray was affronted; the idea was appalling. Then the natural corollary of his own previous statement occurred to him. “Well—I mean—”
“Yes?” Pitt asked patiently.
“It’s impractical,” Gillivray blushed as he said it. “The men who use people like Albie Frobisher have money—they’re probably gentlemen. We can’t go around arresting men of that sort for something obscene like perversion! Think what would happen.”
There was no need for Pitt to comment; he knew the expression on his face spoke for him.
“Lots of men have all sorts of—of perverted tastes.” Gillivray’s cheeks were scarlet now. “We can’t go meddling into everyone’s affairs. What’s done privately, as long as no one is forced, is—” He took a breath and let it out heavily. “Well, it’s best left alone! We should concern ourselves with crimes, with frauds, robberies, attacks, and things like that—where someone’s been offended. What a gentleman chooses to do in his bedroom is his own business, and if it’s against the law of God—like adultery—still best leave it to God to punish!”
Pitt smiled and looked at the window and the rain running down it, and at the gloomy street beyond.
“Unless, of course, it’s Jerome!”
“Jerome wasn’t prosecuted for unnatural practices,” Gillivray said quickly. “He was charged with murder!”
“Are you saying that if he hadn’t killed Arthur, you would have turned a blind eye to the other?” Pitt asked incredulously. Then suddenly, almost like an afterthought, he realized that Gillivray had said Jerome was charged with murder, not that he was guilty of it. Was that merely a clumsy choice of words, or an unintentional sign of some thread of doubt that ran through his mind?
“If he hadn’t killed him, I don’t suppose anyone would have known!” Gillivray had the perfect, reasoned answer ready.
Pitt gave no argument; that was almost certainly true. And of course if there had been no murder, Anstey Waybourne would certainly not have prosecuted. What man in his right mind exposes his son to such a scandal? He would simply have discharged Jerome without a character reference, and let that be vengeance enough. Hint, innuendo that Jerome’s morals were unsatisfactory, without any specific charge, would have ruined his career, and Arthur’s name would never have entered into it.
“Anyway,” Gillivray continued, “it’s all over now and you’ll only cause a lot of unnecessary trouble if you keep on about it. I don’t know anything else about Albie Frobisher, and I don’t choose to. Neither will you, if you know what’s good for you—with respect, sir!”
“Do you believe Jerome killed Arthur Waybourne?” Pitt said suddenly, surprising even himself with such a naively blunt question.
Gillivray’s blue eyes were hot, curiously glazed with some discomfort inside him.
“I’m not the jury, Mr. Pitt, and it’s not my job to decide a man’s guilt or his innocence. I don’t know. All things considered, it seems like it. And, more important, the law of the land says so, and I accept that.”
“I see.” There was nothing else to say. He let the subject die, and turned back to the arson.
Twice more, Pitt managed to find himself in Bluegate Fields, in the neighborhood of Albie Frobisher’s rooming house, but Albie had still not returned. When he called the third time, a boy even younger than Albie, with cynical, curious eyes, opened the door and invited him in. The room had been re-let. Albie was already replaced as if he had never existed. After all, why allow perfectly good premises to stand idle when they could be made to earn?
He made discreet inquiries at one or two other stations in similar areas—Seven Dials, Whitechapel, Mile End, St. Giles, the Devil’s Acre—but no one had heard of Albie moving in. That in itself did not mean a lot. There were thousands of beggars, prostitutes, petty thieves drifting from one area to another. Most of them died young, but in the sea of humanity they were no more missed than one wave in an ocean, and no more distinguishable. One knew occasional names or faces, because their owners gave information, provided steady leaks from the underworld that made most police detection possible, but the vast majority stayed brief and anonymous.
But Albie, like Abigail Winters, had disappeared.
The next day, with no plan in his head, Pitt went back to Newgate Prison to see Maurice Jerome. As soon as he stepped through the gates, he was met by the familiar smell; it was as if he had been gone only a few moments since last time. Only a few moments since the vast, dripping walls had enclosed him.
Jerome was sitting on the straw mattress in exactly the same position he’d been in when Pitt had left him. He was still shaven, but his face was grayer, his bones more visible through the skin, his nose more pinched. His shirt collar was still stiff and clean. That would be Eugenie!
Suddenly, Pitt found his stomach heave at the whole slow, obscene affair. He had to swallow and breathe deeply to prevent himself from being sick.
The turnkey slammed the door behind him. Jerome turned to look. Pitt was jarred by the intelligence in the man’s eyes; he had lately been thinking of him merely as an object, a victim. Jerome was as intelligent as Pitt himself, and immeasurably more so than his jailers. He knew what was going to happen; he was not some trapped animal, but a man with imagination and reason. He would probably die a hundred times before that final dawn. He would feel the rope, experience the pain in some form or other, every moment he could not concentrate enough to drive it out of his mind.
Was there hope in his face?
How incredibly stupid of Pitt to have come! How sadistic! Their eyes met and the hope vanished.
“What do you want?” Jerome said coldly.
Pitt did not know what he wanted. He had come only because time was short, and if he did not come soon, he could not come at all. Perhaps there was still a thought somewhere in his mind that Jerome would even now say something that would give him a new line to follow. To say so, to imply that there was any chance at all, would be a refinement of torture that was unforgivable.
“What do you want?” Jerome repeated. “If you are hoping for a confession to ease your sleep, you are wasting your time. I did not kill Arthur Waybourne, nor did I have, or desire”—his nostrils widened with disgust—“any physical relationship with him, or either of the other boys.”
Pitt sat down on the straw.
“I don’t suppose you went to Abigail Winters either, or Albie Frobisher?” he asked.
Jerome looked at him suspiciously, expecting sarcasm. It was not there.
“No.”
“Do you know why they lied?”
“No.” His face twisted. “You believe me? Hardly makes any difference now, does it.” It was a statement, not a question. There was no lift in him, no lightness. Life had conspired against him, and he did not expect it to change now.
His self-pity provoked Pitt.
“No,” he said shortly. “It makes no difference. And I don’t know that I do believe you. But I went back to talk to the girl again. She’s disappeared. Then I went to look for Albie, and he’s disappeared too.”
“Doesn’t make any difference,” Jerome replied, staring at the wet stones on the far side of the cell. “As long as those two boys keep up the lie that I tried to interfere with them.”
“Why are they doing it?” Pitt asked frankly. “Why should they lie?”
“Spite—what else?” Jerome’s voice was heavy with scorn; scorn for the boys because they had stooped to dishonesty from personal emotion, and for Pitt for his stupidity.
“Why?” Pitt persisted. “Why did they hate you enough to say something like that if it’s not true? What did you do to them to cause such hatred?”
“I tried to make them learn! I tried to teach them self-discipline, standards!”
“What’s hateful about that? Wouldn’t their fathers do the same thing? Their entire world is governed by standards,” Pitt reasoned. “Self-discipline so rigid they’d endure physical pain rather than be seen to lose face. When I was a boy, I watched men of that class hide agony rather than admit they were hurt and be seen to drop out of a hunt. I remember a man who was terrified of horses, but would mount with a smile and ride all day, then come home and be sick all night with sheer relief that he was still alive. And he did it every year, rather than admit he hated it and let down his standards of what a gentleman should be.”
Jerome sat in silence. It was the sort of idiotic courage he admired, and it galled him to see it in the class that had excluded him. His only defense against rejection was hatred.
The question remained unanswered. He did not know why the boys should lie, and neither did Pitt. The trouble was Pitt did not believe they were lying, and yet when he was with Jerome he honestly did not believe Jerome was lying either. The thing was ridiculous!
Pitt sat for another ten minutes in near silence, then shouted for the turnkey and took his leave. There was nothing else to say; pleasantries were an insult. There was no future, and it would be cruel to pretend there was. Whatever the truth, Pitt owed Jerome at least that decency.
Athelstan was waiting for him at the police station the following morning. There was a constable standing by Pitt’s desk with orders that he report upstairs instantly.
“Yes, sir?” Pitt inquired as soon as Athelstan’s voice shouted at him to come in.
Athelstan was sitting behind his desk. He had not even lit a cigar and his face was mottled with the rage he had been obliged to suppress until Pitt arrived.
“Who the hell told you you could go on visiting Jerome?” he demanded, rising from his chair to half straighten his legs and give himself more height.
Pitt felt his back stiffen and the muscles grow tight across his scalp.
“Didn’t know I needed permission,” he said coldly, “Never have done before.”
“Don’t be impertinent with me, Pitt!” Athelstan stood straight up and leaned across the desk. “The case is closed! I told you that ten days ago, when the jury had brought in their verdict. It’s none of your business, and I ordered you to leave it alone then! Now I hear you’ve been poking around behind my back—trying to see witnesses! What in hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I haven’t spoken to any witnesses,” Pitt said truthfully, although it was not for the want of trying. “I can’t—they’ve disappeared!”
“Disappeared? What do you mean ‘disappeared’? People of that sort are always coming and going—jetsam, scum of society, always drifting from one place to another. Lucky we caught them when we did, or maybe we wouldn’t have got their testimony. Don’t talk rubbish, man. They haven’t disappeared like a decent citizen might. They’ve just gone from one whorehouse to another. Means nothing—nothing at all. Do you hear me?”
Since he was shouting at the top of his voice, the question was redundant.
“Of course I can hear you, sir,” Pitt answered, stonefaced.
Athelstan flushed crimson with anger.
“Stand still when I’m talking to you! Now I hear you’ve been to see Jerome—not only once, but twice! What for, that’s what I should like to know—what for? We don’t need a confession now. The man’s been proved guilty. Jury of his peers—that’s the law of the land.” He swung his arms around, crossing them in front of him in a scissor-like motion. “The thing is finished. The Metropolitan Police Force pays you to catch criminals, Pitt, and, if you can, to prevent crime in the first place. It does not pay you to defend them, or to try and discredit the law courts and their verdicts! Now if you can’t do that job properly, as you’re told, then you’d better leave the force and find something you can do. Do you understand me?”
“No, sir, I don’t!” Pitt stood stiff as a ramrod. “Are you telling me that I’m to do only exactly what I’m told, without following my own intelligence or my own suspicions—or else I’ll be dismissed?”
“Don’t be so damn stupid!” Athelstan slammed the desk with his hand. “Of course I’m not! You’re a detective—but not on any damn case you like! I am telling you, Pitt, that if you don’t leave the Jerome business alone, I’ll put you back to walking the beat as a constable—and I can do it, I promise you.”
“Why?” Pitt faced him, demanding an explanation, trying to back him into saying something indefensible. “I haven’t seen any witnesses. I haven’t been near the Waybournes or the Swynfords. But why shouldn’t I talk to Abigail Winters or Albie Frobisher, or visit Jerome? What do you think anyone is going to say that can matter now? What can they change? Who’s going to say something different?”
“Nobody! Nobody at all! But you’re stirring up a lot of ill-feeling. You’re making people doubt, making them think there’s something being hidden, something nasty and dirty, still secret. And that amounts to slander!”
“Like what, for instance—what is there still to find out?”
“I don’t know! Dear God—how should I know what’s in your twisted mind? You’re obsessed! But I’m telling you, Pitt, I’ll break you if you take one more step in this case. It’s closed. We’ve got the man who is guilty. The courts have tried him and sentenced him. You have no right to question their decision or cast doubts on it! You are undermining the law, and I won’t have it!”
“I’m not undermining the law!” Pitt said derisively. “I’m trying to make sure we’ve got all the evidence, to make sure we don’t make mistakes—”
“We haven’t made any mistakes!” Athelstan’s face was purple and there was a muscle jumping in his jowl. “We found the evidence, the courts decide, and it’s not part of your job to sit in judgment. Now get out and find this arsonist, and take care of whatever else there is on your desk. If I have to call you back up here over Maurice Jerome, or anything to do with that case, anything whatsoever, I’ll see you back as a constable. Right now, Pitt!” He flung out his arm and pointed at the door. “Out!”
There was no point in arguing. “Yes, sir,” Pitt said wearily. “I’m going.”
Before the end of the week, Pitt knew why he had not been able to find Albie. The news came as a courtesy from the Deptford police station. It was just a simple message that a body that had been pulled out of the river might be Albie, and if it was of any interest to Pitt, he was welcome to come and look at it.
He went. After all, Albie Frobisher was involved in one of his cases, or had been. That he had been pulled out of the water at Deptford did not mean that that was where he had gone in—far more likely Bluegate Fields, where Pitt had last seen him.
He did not tell anyone where he was going. He said simply that the Deptford station had sent a message for him, a possible identification of a corpse. That was reasonable enough, and happened all the time, men from one station assisting another.
It was one of those hard, glittering days when the east wind comes off the Channel like a whip, lashing the skin, stinging the eyes. Pitt pulled his collar higher, his muffler tighter around his throat, then jammed his hat down so the wind did not catch it under the brim and snatch it off.
The cab ran smartly along the streets, horses’ hooves ringing on the ice-cold stones, the cabby bundled so high in clothes he could hardly see. When they stopped at the Deptford police station, Pitt got out, already stiff with cold from sitting still. He paid the cabbie and dismissed him. He might be a long time; he wanted to know far more than the identity—if this was indeed Albie.
Inside there was a potbellied stove burning, with a kettle on it, and a uniformed constable sat near the stove with a mug of tea in his hand. He recognized Pitt and stood up.
“Morning, Mr. Pitt, sir. You come to look at that corpse we got? Like a cup o’ tea first? Not a nice sight, and a wicked cold day, sir.”
“No, thanks—see it first, then I’d like one. Talk about it a bit—if it’s the bloke I know.”
“Poor little beggar.” The constable shook his head. “Still maybe ’e’s best out of it. Lived longer than some of ’em. We’ve still got ’im ’ere, out the back. No hurry for the morgue on a day like this.” He shivered. “Reckon as we could keep ’em froze right ’ere for a week!”
Pitt was inclined to agree. He nodded at the constable and shuddered in sympathy.
“Fancy keeping a morgue, do you?”
“Well, they’d ’ave to be less trouble ’n the live ones.” The constable was a philosopher. “And don’t need no feedin’!” He led the way through a narrow corridor whistling with drafts, down some stone steps, and up into a bare room where a sheet covered a lumpy outline on a wooden table.
“There you are, sir. ’E the one wot you knows?”
Pitt pulled the sheet off the head and looked down. The river had made its mark. There was mud and a little slimy weed on the hair, the skin was smudged, but it was Albie Frobisher.
He looked farther down, at the neck. There was no need to ask how he had died; there were finger marks, bruised and dark, on the flesh. He had probably been dead before he hit the water. Pitt moved the sheet off the rest of him, automatically. He would be careless to overlook anything else, if there was anything.
The body was even thinner than he had expected, younger than it had seemed with clothes on. The bones were so slight and the skin still had the blemishless, translucent quality of childhood. Perhaps that had been part of his stock in trade, his success.
“Is that ’im?” the constable said from just behind him.
“Yes.” Pitt put the sheet back over him. “Yes, that’s Albie Frobisher. Do you know anything about it?”
“Not much to know,” the constable said grimly. “We get ’em out of the river every week, sometimes every day in the winter. Some of ’em we recognize, a lot we never know. You finished ’ere?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Then come back and ’ave that cup o’ tea.” He led the way back to the potbellied stove and the kettle. They both sat down with steaming mugs.
“He was strangled,” Pitt said unnecessarily. “You’ll be treating it as murder?”
“Oh, yes.” The constable pulled a face. “Not that I suppose it’ll make much difference. ’Oo knows ’oo killed the poor little beggar? Could ’ave bin anyone, couldn’t it? ’Oo was ’e anyway?”
“Albert Frobisher,” Pitt replied, aware of the irony of such a name. “At least that’s how we knew him. He was a male prostitute.”
“Oh—the one wot gave evidence in the Waybourne case—poor little swine. Didn’t last long, did ’e? Killed to do with that, was ’e?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well—” The constable finished the last of his tea and set the mug down. “Could ’ave bin, couldn’t it? Then again, in that sort o’ trade you can get killed for lots o’ different reasons. All comes to the same in the end, don’t it? Want ’im, I suppose? Shall I send ’im up to your station?”
“Yes, please.” Pitt stood up. “We’d better tidy it up. It may have nothing to do with the Waybourne case, but he comes from Bluegate Fields anyway. Thanks for the tea.” He handed the mug back.
“Welcome, sir, I’m sure. I’ll send ’im along as soon as my sergeant gives the word. It’ll be this afternoon, though. No point in ’anging around.”
“Thank you. Good day, Constable.”
“ ’Day, sir.”
Pitt walked toward the shining stretch of the river. It was slack tide, and the black slime of the embankment smelled acrid. The wind rippled the surface and caught tiny white shreds of spray up against slow-moving barges. They were going up the river to the Pool of London and the docks. Pitt wondered where they had come from, those shrouded cargoes. Could be anywhere on earth: the deserts of Africa, the wastes north of Hudson Bay where it was winter six months long, the jungles of India, or the reefs of the Caribbean. And that was without even going outside the Empire. He remembered seeing the map of the world, with British possessions all in red—seemed to be every second country. They said the sun never set on the Empire.
And this city was the heart of it all. London was where your Queen lived, whether you were in the Sudan or the Cape of Good Hope, Tasmania, Barbados, the Yukon, or Katmandu.
Did a boy like Albie ever know that he lived in the heart of such a world? Did the inhabitants of those teeming, rotten slums behind the proud streets ever conceive in their wildest drunken or opium-scented dreams of the wealth they were part of? All that immense might—and they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, even begin on the disease at home.
The barges were gone, the water shining silver in their wake, the flat light brilliant as the sun moved slowly westward. Some hours hence, the sky would redden, giving the pall-like clouds of the factories and docks the illusion of beauty before sunset.
Pitt straightened up and started to walk. He must find a cab and get back to the station. Athelstan would have to allow him to investigate now. This was a new murder. It might have nothing to do with Jerome or Arthur Waybourne, but it was still a murder. And murder must be solved, if it can be.
“No!” Athelstan shouted, rising to his feet. “Good God, Pitt! The boy was a prostitute! He catered to perverts! He was bound to end up either dead of some disease or murdered by a customer or a pimp or something. If we spent time on every dead prostitute, we’d need a force twice the size, and we’d still do nothing else. Do you know how many deaths there are in London every day?”
“No, sir. Do they stop mattering once they get past a certain number?”
Athelstan slammed his hand on the desk, sending papers flying.
“God dammit, Pitt, I’ll have your rank for insubordination! Of course it matters! If there was any chance, or any reason, I’d investigate it right to the end. But murder of a prostitute is not uncommon. If you take up a trade like that, then you expect violence—and disease—and sooner or later you’ll get it!
“I’m not sending my men out to comb the streets uselessly. We’ll never find out who killed Albie Frobisher. It could have been any one of a thousand people—ten thousand! Who knows who went into that house? Anyone! Anyone at all. Nobody sees them—that’s the nature of the place—and you bloody well know that as well as I do. I’m not wasting an inspector’s time, yours or anyone else’s, chasing after a hopeless case.
“Now get out of here and find that arsonist! You know who he is—so arrest him before we have another fire! And if I hear you mention Maurice Jerome, the Waybournes, or anything else to do with it again, I’ll put you back on the beat—and that I swear—so help me, God!”
Pitt said nothing more. He turned on his heel and walked out, leaving Athelstan still standing, his face crimson, his fists clenched on the desk.