Belgrave Square (27 page)

“Sorry I can’t help you,” Urban apologized again, and smiled courteously as Pitt took his leave.

Investigating Urban proved to be both as difficult and as distasteful as Pitt had expected. He began by going to Urban’s home. This time he took the public omnibus, as the route took him to within five hundred yards of the street, and he was in no particular hurry. Indeed the hot, noisy ride on the bus, sitting squashed between a thin woman in blue with a cold in her head and a large man smelling of beer, gave him an opportunity to let his thoughts roam. Not that it accomplished anything. He had liked Urban and the thought of prying into his private life was increasingly unpleasant. And because he was intelligent and forewarned, this would prove very difficult to accomplish without his becoming aware of it.

By asking him openly about Weems he had forewarned him that Pitt knew he was connected with the case. He was still feeling angry and miserable about Charlotte, furious with her for behaving as if she were a lady with leisure and money to do as she pleased, and for not making better use of her time than entertaining herself. And he was miserable because that was what she had been born to expect, and she was so easily and naturally enjoying the chance that Emily had given her and Pitt never could. And it hurt that she should still find these things so important. He had enjoyed the spectacle of the occasion himself. People had always interested him, people of every sort, and he had been enthralled watching the faces, and observing the ritual games they played with one another, and the passions behind the masks.

But this investigation he was carrying out alone. For once Charlotte knew almost nothing about it, and her concern was not engaged. It was a curiously lonely thing and he missed her sharing it, even if she did not know the people and could contribute nothing but her interest.

What should he learn about Urban? His reputation among his fellows? His home, his life, the money he spent? His professional integrity? He was lying about something, even if only by omission. Could he possibly know why Addison
Carswell had dismissed the case against Osmar? Carswell’s name was on Weems’s list as well—but what had Osmar to do with it? And if it was blackmail, why was Byam’s name not there?

He got off the omnibus and walked the last distance along the narrow pavement in the heat, passing women with children, old men gossiping, a tradesman sweeping his shop’s front step, a rag and bone man shouting in a singsong voice, and a housemaid in a crisp cap arguing with a butcher’s boy standing in the areaway wiping his hands on his blue-and-white apron. It was not far from where he lived himself, and not unlike his street. He pushed the thought of Charlotte out of his mind; that was another hurt, for another time.

Urban’s house was quite small and ordinary from the outside, exactly like its neighbors. The front step was scrubbed clean, the door recently painted, the garden was small and neat with a few roses around and a pocket handkerchief lawn. He had already debated with himself what he was going to say. There was little point in duplicity. It would be too easily discovered, and then would create an ill feeling that would be hard, if not impossible, to repair. And if Urban was innocent, that would be an impediment to future work.

The door was opened by a small woman in a gray stuff dress and a plain white apron. Her thick reddish hair was tied back in a knot and there was a white cap balanced precariously, and crookedly, on top of her head. She reminded him of the woman who came to do the heavy scrubbing for Charlotte, and whom Gracie bossed around mercilessly, now that she considered herself a senior servant.

“Yes?” the woman said impatiently. Obviously he had interrupted her in her work and she did not appreciate it.

“Good morning,” he said quickly. “I am conducting a police investigation and I need to examine some papers of Inspector Urban’s. My name is Pitt. May I come in?”

She looked doubtful. “ ’Ow do I know you’re tellin’ me the truth? You could be anyone.”

“I could,” he agreed, and produced his police identification.

She looked at the card carefully. Her eyes did not move along the line, and Pitt guessed she could not read. She
looked up at him again, studying his face, and he waited for her to make her judgment.

“All right,” she said at last. “If it’s police yer’d better come in. But ’E in’t done nuffink wrong.”

“It’s information I need,” he said, somewhat begging the question, and followed her into the narrow hallway where she opened one of the doors into the front parlor. “That’s where ’E keeps ’is papers,” she said stiffly. “Anyfink yer wantin’ll be in there. If it in’t, then it in’t ’ere at all.” It was a definite statement he was not going to be allowed anywhere else.

“Thank you,” he accepted. She remained standing rooted to the spot, her eyes hard and bright. Obviously she was not going to leave him alone, policeman or not. He smiled to himself, then began to look around. It was not a large room, and the space was further crowded by at least a dozen paintings on the walls. They were not at all what he would have expected, family portraits, sentimental pastoral scenes or sporting prints. Rather they were very modern impressions of sunlit landscapes: bars of light, blurs of water lilies all blues and greens with flashes of pink; a dazzle of shades and points of vivid color which conjured peasant women lying under the trees by the side of a cornfield. They were highly individual experiments in art, the selection of a man who had very definite opinions and was prepared to spend a good deal of money investing in what he believed to be good. There was no need to look any further for the part of Urban’s lifestyle that would run him into debt. It was here on his walls for any caller to observe.

He stayed a few minutes longer, examining the pictures more closely, seeing the brushwork, the imagination and the skill that had gone into them. Then he went over to the desk and opened it in order to satisfy the waiting housekeeper that he was indeed looking for information of a sort she could understand. He shuffled through a couple of papers, read one, and closed the drawer. Then he swung around to face her. She looked faintly surprised that he should be finished so soon.

“You all done then?” she said with a frown.

“Yes thank you. It was only a small thing, and easily found.”

“Oh—well then you’d best be gone. I got work to do. Mr. Urban’s not the only gennelman as I see after. Mind my step as you go out. Don’t go dragging your feet over it. I just done that, I did.”

Pitt stepped over it carefully and went on down the path and out of the gate. The beauty of the pictures, the courage to back such individual and daring taste should have pleased him. Ordinarily it would have; but this time, knowing Urban’s salary, and that he was lying over something, he found it deeply depressing. Was Urban so wooed by loveliness, so caught by the collector’s fever, that he had borrowed from Weems, and then realized he could never hope to repay? Or was there something even uglier: had he obtained the money in some other way, dishonest, even corrupt, and Weems had learned of it and blackmailed him?

Pitt lengthened his stride along the hot, dusty street, passing an errand boy whistling between his teeth, swinging a bag, then two old women standing in the middle of the footpath, heads together, gossiping. At the end of the street he came into the main thoroughfare and stood waiting for the omnibus, his mind moving from one unhappy thought to another.

He knew what he must do next, and he chose a series of omnibuses because he was in no hurry to get there. Before coming to Bow Street, Urban had worked in Rotherhithe, south of the river. Now Pitt must go to his old station and ask his colleagues about him, what manner of man he was, and try to read between the loyalty of their answers the truth of what they knew, or suspected. He would have to look through his previous cases, such as were distinctly his. It was not so clear-cut with uniformed men. And lastly he would have to find the people on the edge of the criminal underworld who had most dealings with the police and ask them, learn what Urban’s reputation had been, see if he could find there the ends of the threads which would lead him to the money that had bought those wild and lovely pictures.

He stopped and had a brief luncheon at a public house, but his thoughts were too much engrossed in Urban to enjoy it. By two o’clock he was in the Rotherhithe police station, explaining his inquiries to the superintendent, a large man with a lugubrious smile and a hot untidy office full of piles
of paper. In a patch of sun on the floor a small ginger-and-white kitten lay stretched out asleep on a cushion, every now and then its body twitching in some ecstatic dream.

The superintendent’s eyes followed Pitt’s.

“Found ’im in the alley,” he said with a smile. “Poor little beggar was starvin’ an’ sickly. Don’t think ’e’d ’ave lasted more’n another day or two. ’ad ter take ’im in. Need a mouser anyway. Can’t ’ave the station overrun wi’ the little beggars. ’e’ll be good fer that when ’e’s a bit bigger. Thinks about it already, by the looks of ’im.”

The kitten gave another twitch and made a little sound in its sleep.

“What can I do for yer?” the superintendent said in a businesslike manner, pushing a pile of papers off a chair to make a place for Pitt to sit down. The cushion remained for the kitten. Pitt had no objection.

“Samuel Urban,” Pitt replied, looking at the little animal.

“Engagin’ little beggar, in’t ’e?” the superintendent said mildly.

“What did you think of him?”

“Sam Urban? Liked ’im. Good policeman.” His face puckered with anxiety. “Not in trouble, is ’e?”

“Don’t know,” Pitt admitted, looking at the kitten stretching out and curling its claws into the cushion, pulling the threads.

“Hector!” the superintendent said amiably. “Don’t do that.” The kitten disregarded him totally and kept on kneading the cushion. “Taken from ’is mother too early, poor little devil,” the superintendent continued. “Suckles on my shirts till I’m wet through. What’s ’E supposed to ’ave done, Urban, or shouldn’t I ask?”

“Borrowed money from a usurer, maybe,” Pitt replied.

The superintendent pushed out his lip. “Not like ’im,” he said thoughtfully. “Always careful with ’is money, that I know of. Never threw it around. In fact I sometimes wondered what ’E did wif it. Never drank nor spent it on women, like some. Didn’t gamble, so far as I ’eard. What’s ’E got in debt for? Inherited an ’Ouse from ’is uncle, so it in’t that. In fact that’s why ’E moved to Bow Street—’ouse is in Bloomsbury. Are you sure about this debt?”

“No,” Pitt admitted. “His name was on the usurer’s books for a very considerable sum. Urban denies it.”

“I don’t like the way you say ‘was.’ You mean the usurer is dead?”

“Yes.” There was no use trying to deceive the big, good-natured man. He might take in stray kittens, but he was far from naive when it came to judging men. Pitt had seen the clear, clever eyes under the lazy stare.

“Murdered?”

“Yes. I’m following up all the debtors—or those that the lists say are debtors. So far all of them on the first list admit to owing very small amounts. Those on the second list deny it. But he was known to be a blackmailer …” He left the question open, an unfinished sentence.

“And you think he may have been blackmailing Urban?”

“I don’t know—but I need to.”

The kitten stretched, rolled over and curled up in a ball, purring gently.

“Can’t ’elp you,” the superintendent said with a little shake of his head. “ ’E weren’t always a popular man. Too free with ’is opinions, even when they wasn’t asked for, an’ got some airy-fairy tastes what in’t always appreciated by all. But that’s by the way. It’s no crime.”

“May I see the records of his main cases, and speak to a few of his colleagues?”

“O’ course. But I know what goes on in my station. You won’t find anything.”

And so it proved. Pitt spoke to several of the men who had worked with Urban in the six years he had been in Rotherhithe, and found a variety of opinions from affection to outright dislike, but none of them saw in him either dishonesty or any failure of prosecution that was not easily accounted for by the circumstances. Some considered him arrogant and were not afraid to say so, but gave not the slightest indication they thought him corrupt.

Pitt left in the warm, still early evening and came back over the river north again on the long journey home. He felt tired and discouraged, and underneath was a growing unease. The Rotherhithe station had offered nothing about Urban that suggested he was dishonest. Everything Pitt learned created the outline of a diligent, ambitious, somewhat eccentric
man respected by his colleagues but not often liked, a man whom no one knew closely, and whom a few conservative, small-visioned men were tacitly pleased to see apparently in trouble.

And Pitt was sure in his own mind that Urban was concealing something to do with Weems’s death, and it was something Pitt had said which had made the connection in his mind. But was it the questions about Weems and his debtors, or could it be as it appeared, the extraordinary case of Horatio Osmar and his unaccountable release by Carswell?

He was obliged to travel on several omnibuses, changing at intervals as each one turned from his route back to Bloomsbury. At one change he saw a tired, grubby-faced little girl selling violets, and on impulse he stopped and bought four bunches, dark purple, nestling in their leaves, damp and sweet smelling.

He strode along his own street rapidly, but with an unfamiliar mixture of emotions. It was habit steeped in years that his home was the sweetest place he knew. All warmth and certainty was there, love that did not depend upon gifts or obedience, did not matter whether he was clever, amusing or elegant. It was the place where he gave the best of himself, and yet was not afraid he would be rejected for the worst; where he strove to be wise, to blend honesty with kindness, to make patience natural, to protect without domineering.

Nothing had changed in the deep core of it, but perhaps his perception had deluded him into believing Charlotte was happier than was true. Some of the bright peace of it was dulled.