Belgrave Square (11 page)

However before Pitt could approach the subject Innes made it unnecessary.

“Mornin’ sir,” he said, straightening to attention, his eyes wide, his face keen. “Doctor sent a message for us to come to the morgue. ’e’s found something as ’e’s never seen in ’is life before. Says it makes this a poetic kind of a murder.”

“Poetic,” Pitt said incredulously. “A grubby little usurer has his head shot off in Clerkenwell, and he thinks it’s poetic! Probably some poor debtor driven to despair couldn’t take it any more and his mind snapped, nothing more to lose. I don’t think I could face a doctor who sees poetry in that.”

Innes’s face fell.

“Oh I’m coming,” Pitt assured him quickly. “Then we’ll have to start going through the list and finding these poor devils. At least we can weed out those who can prove they were elsewhere.” As he was speaking he turned around and went out into the street again, Innes matching him pace for pace, stretching his legs to keep up.

“Would you take family’s word for it, sir?” he said doubtfully. “They’d stick together, natural. Wife’s word’s not much good. Any woman worth anythin’d say ’er man were at ’ome. an’ that’s where ’e’s most likely to be at that time o’ night. Unless ’E ’as night work.”

“Well that’d be something,” Pitt conceded. He knew he was going to hate this. It was painful enough to see the despair of poverty, the thin faces, the cramped, ill-drained houses, the undersized, sickly children, without having to pry into their fears and embarrassment, and maybe leave them terrified of a yet worse evil. “We’ll exclude some of them.”

“What about the big debtors, sir?” Innes asked, skipping
off the pavement onto the roadway, dodging a dray cart and making a leap back onto the curb at the far side. “Are you goin’ ter see them?”

Pitt ducked under the huge dray horse’s head as it shied upward, and made a dive at the curb himself.

“Yes, when we’ve got a start on the others,” he replied, out of breath.

Innes grinned. “I guess as you in’t lookin’ forward to that much, askin’ nobs if they’re in debt ter a back street usurer, an’ please sir did yer shoot ’is ’ead orf?”

Pitt smiled in spite of himself. “No,” he said wryly. “I’m still hoping it won’t be necessary.”

Innes was saved from replying by the fact that they had reached the steps of the morgue. He fell behind Pitt and followed him up and inside. Again the smell of carbolic, wet stone and death met them, and involuntarily they both tightened their muscles and flared their nostrils very slightly, as if somehow one could close one’s nose against it, stop it from reaching the back of the throat.

The doctor was in a small room off the main hall, sitting behind a wooden table which was covered with odd sheets of paper.

“Ah!” he said as soon as he saw them. “You on the Clerkenwell shooting? Got something for you. Very rummy, this corpse of yours. Most poetic thing I ever saw, I swear.”

Innes pulled a face.

“Shot,” the doctor said unnecessarily. He was wearing a scruffy coat splashed with blood and acid, and his shirt was obviously laundered, but no one had bothered trying to remove the deep ingrained stains from it. Apparently he had recently left some more grisly work for this meeting. He was sitting facing them, a goose-quill pen in his hand.

“I know.” Pitt was confused. “We know he was shot. What we don’t know is with what gun. The only gun in his office was a hackbut, and it was broken.”

“Ah!” The doctor was increasingly pleased with himself. “What kind of bullets though—you don’t know that, now do you, eh?”

“We didn’t see any,” Pitt conceded. “Whatever it was made a terrible mess of him. But it was pretty close range.
The hackbut could have done it, only the pin was filed down.”

“Wouldn’t have recognized it if you had,” the doctor said, now positively oozing satisfaction. “Wouldn’t have thought a thing of it. Most natural event in the world.”

“Would you be good enough to explain yourself?” Pitt said very levelly, sounding each word. “What have you got?”

“Oh—” The doctor caught his exaggerated patience and realized he had tempted them long enough. “This!” He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his handkerchief, and very carefully unfolded it to show a bright gold guinea.

For a moment Pitt did not understand.

“So you have a gold guinea—”

“I found it in your Mr. Weems’s brain,” the doctor said with relish. “Got another, pretty bent. That one must have hit a lot of bone. Gold isn’t very hard, you know. But this one’s in good shape. Queen Victoria, 1876, thirteen years old.” He pulled a face. “Your usurer, gentleman, was shot by a gun loaded with gold coin. Someone has a nice sense of irony.”

The room they were in was bare and functional. Their voices echoed slightly.

“Poetry,” Pitt agreed with a humor that had a dark chill to it, a crawling on the skin, and a clamminess.

“Shot with ’is own money?” Innes said with amazement. “Oh that’s black, that’s very black.”

“Wouldn’t have thought any of those poor beggars would have that much imagination,” the doctor said with a shrug. “But there it is. Straight out of his brain—with a pair of forceps. Swear to it on the Bible.”

Pitt imagined it with a shiver: the quiet room above Cyrus Street, the lamps burning, gas hissing gently in the brackets, the sound of hooves from the street below, Weems sitting at his desk implacable, yielding nothing, the shadowy figure with a huge barreled weapon loading it with gold—and the explosion of the shot, the side of Weems’s head blown apart.

“What happened to the other pieces?” he asked. “You aren’t saying two gold coins did all that damage, are you?”

“No—not possible,” the doctor agreed. “Must have been four or five at least. I can only think the man, whoever he
was, picked up those that weren’t embedded too deep in flesh—if you can imagine that. Cold-blooded devil.”

Innes shuddered, and swore under his breath.

“But the gun,” Pitt persisted, forcing the picture out of his mind. “It would take a wide-barreled gun, a big gun, to shoot gold pieces like that.”

“Well it couldn’t ’ave bin the ’ackbut,” Innes reasoned. “There was no way the devil ’imself could’ve fired that. ’E must ’ave brought it with ’im—and taken it away again. Although ’ow no one noticed a feller carryin’ a great thing like that I don’t know.” He pushed out his lip. “O’ course maybe they did notice it, and no one’s sayin’. Could be a sort o’ silent conspiracy. No one loves a usurer, especially not Weems. ’E were ’ard, very ’ard.”

“Even if the entire neighborhood was against him,” Pitt agreed, “that doesn’t account for why he himself sat there while this maniac scooped up the gold, filled the pan with powder, put the coin into the barrel, rammed it, leveled it and fired. Why did Weems remain sitting in his seat staring at him all the time?”

“I don’t know,” Innes said candidly. “It don’t make sense.”

“Only the facts.” The doctor shrugged expansively. “I just find the facts for you, gentlemen. You have to put them together. I can tell you he was shot with a terrible blast, close to his head, not more than four or five feet away—but maybe you know that from the size of the room anyway. And I picked two gold guinea pieces out of his brains—or what was left of them.”

“Thank you,” Pitt answered. “If there’s anything else please let us know immediately.”

“Can’t imagine what else there could be. But of course I’ll tell you.”

“I’m obliged. Good day.” And Pitt turned around and left, Innes close behind him.

Out in the street in the sun Innes sniffed hard and shook his head. “What now, sir? The list?”

“Yes,” Pitt said grimly. “I’m afraid so—poor devils.”

And it was even harder and more painful than he had foreseen. They spent the next three days going from one sparse uncarpeted worn-out house to another where frightened
women answered the door, children clinging to their skirts, pale faced and barefooted.

“Yes?” the first woman said nervously. She was frightened of him because she was frightened of everyone who came to the door.

“Mrs. Colley?” he asked quietly, aware of the passersby, already curious, turning to stare.

She hesitated, then saw no way of escape, and she accepted defeat.

“Yes.” Her voice was flat and without hope. She still stood on the step, apparently it was better to her in spite of her neighbors’ stares. To allow him inside would leave her even more vulnerable, and her desperate poverty more exposed.

He did not know how to tell her who he was without frightening her even more.

“I’m Inspector Pitt, from Bow Street. This is Sergeant Innes—”

“I ’aven’t done nuffink!” Her voice shook. “Wot’s ’appened? W’y are you ’ere?”

The quickest answer was the least cruel.

“Someone your husband knows has been killed. You may be able to help us learn something about it…”

“I dunno nuffink.” Her white face and dull eyes held no guilt, no duplicity, only resignation to misery.

A rag and bone man pushed his cart past, his face turned towards her with interest.

“Is your husband in work, Mrs. Colley?” Pitt went on.

Her chin came up. “Yes ’E is. At Billingsgate, at the fish market. ’E don’t know nuffink about anyone bein’ dead.”

Innes glared at the rag and bone man, who increased his pace and disappeared around the corner into an alley.

“What did he do on Tuesday, Mrs. Colley?” Pitt pursued. “All day, please?”

Haltingly she told him, the child at her knees catching the fear in her voice and in her body and beginning to cry.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “If that’s true then there’s no need to concern yourself. I shall not be back.” He wished he could tell her that Weems was dead, and perhaps her debts would be forgotten, but that would be precipitate, and only raise hopes that might not be realized.

The next small, weary woman was different only in trivial ways; her eyes were brown, her hair grayer, her dress the same colorless cloth, washed and rewashed, patched in places, so thin it hung lank about her body. There was a dark bruise on her cheek. She did not know where her husband had been. His pleasures were few, and she thought he had been down the road at the Goat and Compasses public house. He had come home drunk and slept the night on the kitchen floor where he had fallen when he came home around midnight.

And so it went on, the cycle of wretchedness, born in poverty where there was little food, crowded houses with no drains and no water except from a standpipe down the street, sickness, no education and so the meanest work, and more poverty. And for many the only escape was in alcohol, where present pain was drowned into oblivion. And in drunkenness came violence, loss of work, the pawnshop or moneylender, and another slow step downward.

Pitt hated the men like Weems not because they could have changed it—no one knew how to do that—but because they made a profit out of it. He was going to find it very difficult to care who had killed him. Perhaps a few of his victims would find their cancerous debts wiped clean. There would be no one to claim them, to watch the interest accrue and collect someone’s last few pence every week to pay off a burden that never decreased.

There was nothing to report to Micah Drummond, so Pitt went home to Charlotte and his clean, warm house where everything smelled sweet and he had no fear of the knock on the door. She would tell him all about the ball at Emily’s, the clothes, the food, the chatter. He could watch her face and hear the excitement in her voice, and imagine her playing the society hostess for one night and getting more pleasure out of it than all the duchesses put together, because it was a game, a fancy dress parade. She could come home to sanity at the end, to her children, comfort that had some sort of proportion with the lot of others, the ordinary, sane things like baking bread, mending the children’s clothes, taking the dead heads off the roses, sitting by the open window in the evening and watching the moths in the summer garden.

The following day he and Innes resumed working their
way through the list, this time with the genteel poor, those who struggled to maintain the appearance of respectability and would rather sit in the cold all winter than forgo having a maid because quality always had a maid; people who would eat bread and gravy when they were alone, so that when callers came they could present better fare. These were people who had only one outfit of clothes that were not threadbare, out of fashion, boots that leaked and no coat, but they walked to church every Sunday with heads high and polite smiles and nods to neighbors, and made fantastic excuses why they did not accept invitations, because they could not return the hospitality. He ached for them also, and knew why the doors were answered with fear, and why he was offered tea which was served with shaking hands. He felt a hard, compulsive satisfaction when they could prove where they were when William Weems was shot. It was one advantage the poor had over Lord Byam; privacy was a luxury they tasted very seldom indeed. Almost all of them were crowded with others at that time in the evening, and all night. Few had any space alone, even to wash or to sleep. Many of the very poor shared a single room and they would not do more than dream of a time when they could do otherwise. One loan piled upon another, and the interest swallowed all they had, the capital was never paid off. Debt was a way of life.

Pitt heartily wished whoever had murdered Weems had destroyed all his records. Pitt hated him for that omission far more than for having blown the man’s brains out with half a dozen of his own gold coins.

On the fifth day Pitt took a hansom back to Bow Street to tell Micah Drummond that he had learned nothing so far either to implicate Lord Byam or to exonerate him. It was a little after five in the afternoon and the sun was still high and warm. The trees in the square were in full leaf, and music floated across from the band in Lincoln Inn Fields as he peered out of his cab. Children in bright clothes played with hoops and sticks painted like horses’ heads, and a solemn man with his sleeves rolled up flew a red kite for a small boy whose upturned face was full of wonder. A courting couple strolled by arm in arm, the girl giggling with pleasure, the man swaggering very slightly as if he had something worth showing off to the world. A nursemaid passed going in the
opposite direction, wheeling a perambulator, her head high, her starched apron dazzling white in the sun. Two old gentlemen sat on a wooden seat in the sun, looking faintly dusty in the bright light, their faces benign.